


who he might be

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Death, Hydra (Marvel), Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Multi-POV, POV Outsider, Slow Build, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-08
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-24 15:35:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 39,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2586722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are ways worlds overlap, and this is one of them, the tiny divergences that make us who we are, that run events the way they are.</p><p>Bucky Barnes looks out at the world and he knows that he had always prepared for a world without Steve, but really, he didn't think it would look like this, like toxic lights and shining streets, like how every pulp book he ever read had shown the future. It's so brilliant. Bucky wants to just say, <i>hey, Stevie, look</i>.</p><p>But Steve isn't there.</p><p>Until he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the secret behind the mask of who he might be

**Author's Note:**

> Tags reflect the whole of the work.

What Valeska hears, late at night, are the steps. They are heavy, like the man is wearing big boots, and like maybe he is a bear, too. Her favorite stories are about bears – Misha, is what her papa calls him, all bears are named Misha. Her father is Misha, too, at home, but Mikhail Vladimirovich at work. She thinks about that right now, about her papa and how he tucked her into bed, kissed her on the forehead, and told her not to be scared of the monsters that hid in the dark, when he wasn’t there to protect her.

There are no monsters in the dark, he told her. Misha. Mikhail Vladimirovich. Her papa.

She realizes that she is thinking about it because the man with the heavy boots is saying his name, and she can just hear it. His voice is deep, and he speaks Polish, at first, and then Russian. She can hear her papa say something, something _terrified_ , and she knows it is the monster in the dark that has come for her. Her papa is a big man, a big Russian who is not afraid of anything, but tonight the monster has come for her and she can _hear_ him through the thin walls of their apartment. She looks over and sees the sliver of light under her door, barely enough to illuminate the room, and thinks about what she can do.

It is so dark, and she is so small, small enough to fit into one of the cupboards of the wardrobe. She knows because once, when her cousin came to visit, she hid there to keep him from pulling her braids and getting dirt on her shirt. She hears a noise, sharp, and then there’s silence, and she can’t, she can’t.

She undoes her blankets and runs to the wardrobe, and crams herself into it. Just before she closes the door she sees the terrible shadow of two enormous boots, and she pulls the door shut.

Her breathing is so loud that for a moment she thinks she can’t hear anything else. But as the silence settles into the room, she realizes that no, she can hear something, she can hear the telltale swing of the bedroom door opening.

She pulls her pajamas over her head.

She does not know how long she’s in the wardrobe. It must be only minutes, but it feels longer, hours maybe, like every breath that she takes is spaced apart by longer than normal. She is scared, and very little. Maybe it’s not the monster. Maybe it is her papa.

(But papa doesn’t wear boots inside the house, he doesn’t walk with that slow, heavy step, and he would have said her name already, he would have called her out, _little dove_ , he might have said, if she were afraid.)

When the door to the wardrobe opens, she does not look up. She keeps her pajamas over her head and tries her very best not to cry. “Look up,” a man’s voice says in Polish, and when she doesn’t, he says it again, this time in Russian. “Look up, I need to see.”

She shakes her head and then he is grabbing her and she cries out. He shakes her and she _wails_ , the sound that is coming out of her scaring her just as much as the man. He is cold, cold to touch, and she realizes he is wearing gloves – they are black and one is wet. “Please,” she says, in Polish first, and then when he hits her – across the face – she whimpers it in Russian. The blow is heavy, it hurts her, it hurts her a lot, and her mouth feels funny.

“Look up,” he tells her again, and finally she does.

His face is mostly covered by a mask, that in the darkness makes him look like he has no face at all. But then his eyes are so pale, a blue like the sky on a cold, clear day, when there is snow on the ground, and just as freezing. His hair is short and as her eyes adjust, she can see he is as blonde as Yasha, one of the boys in her class. He is enormous. Bigger than her papa.

He looks down at her and finally tosses her down on the ground. “Your father is dead,” he says, in Russian, rumbling like a train. “You are the child of spy, and no use to anyone, and it would be mercy to kill you.”

She is paralyzed. Her pajamas are wet and the room smells, but maybe the man who has no face does not notice. He doesn’t seem to, anyway. He leans back against the wall, the bulk of him making the room seem tiny, tinier than it ever was when her papa-

When papa-

When Mikhail Vladimirovich-

There is no set of words that come after that which will make it better, but she can’t get up off the floor. She curls there, and finally the man makes a shape with his body, and at the end of one gloved hand, she realizes, is a gun.

He pulls the trigger.

She does not hear the noise.

~~~~~

When he wakes up, it’s slowly.

He turns in the bed, and it’s so warm – finally warm, he thinks to himself, on that precipice just between sleep and wakefulness, when he’s only barely coherent enough to seek out that sunny patch. Napping in the sunshine, Bucky thinks, is one of life’s very greatest gifts, right up there with hot pastrami sandwiches, Fat Freddie’s knuckle-curve, and that look on Steven Grant Rogers face when something good landed in their laps. And napping in sunshine, when there’s a war effort, getting that luxury is even better.

It’s so good, actually, that it takes his brain a good full five minutes to catch up to what’s going on, for his brain to say wait, no, wait a minute. This isn’t right. Last he remembers he was on a train, and Steve-

_Steve-_ he suddenly thinks, his mind going into sharp relief, his brain waking up all the way, and he sits up in bed, suddenly, alarm bells going off. There’s a baseball game on the radio, and there’s suddenly a nurse in his room. Her hair is loose and it’s briefly distracting, and kind of _intimate_ , in way that makes him feel like looking away, like she’s immodest. He resists the urge to say something, and Bucky isn’t sure what he’s paying attention to, the door or-

And then he hears it.

“What’s going on?” he says, his fingers gripping the bed, but something’s wrong, something upsets his balance because he’s suddenly back on the bed, his entire left side off and-

“Sergeant Barnes,” the nurse says, moving to help him, and he suddenly finds he doesn’t care that the radio is playing a baseball game from years ago or that the nurse’s hands have the same kinds of calluses that someone who holds a gun might, or even that she smells strange, different, not like a nurse at all. “Sergeant Barnes, you-“

“My arm-“ he says, gripping her uniform with his right hand, because it’s the only one he has left. Later, he’ll apologize for that, his mother raised him better than to get handsy with a woman he’s never met, and so did Steve, for that matter, but for now he’s too busy focusing on-

Focusing on-

Her dress is starched and stiff, but somehow the shape is wrong, she doesn’t look like a girl from back home, her accent is as flat as he imagines Kansas to be, and he can feel his breathing increase, suddenly. He realizes that maybe, maybe this is what it’s like to have asthma, this terror that he can’t breathe, that there is not enough oxygen in the room for him to suck through his lungs, that somehow when he lost his arm he lost his ability to breathe, too-

“Sergeant Barnes!” she says, sharply, and finally he looks up at her. She gives him a look that is as much concern as pity. “Please,” she repeats, and he takes a gulp of a breath. “Better?”

“Why is there a game from 1941 on the radio?” he asks, because he remembers this game. He and Steve went together, Steve managed not to pick a single fight, and Bucky bought a bag of peanuts that they shared. It was a good afternoon.

Something passes over the nurse’s face, and suddenly Bucky is up on his feet, trying to push past her, but he doesn’t seem to realize how to balance, and he topples again.

This time she pulls him back up. “Sergeant,” she says, and there’s real kindness in her expression. “Please, calm down-“

“Where’s Steve,” he says, feeling like he’s vomiting words now, “where am I, what’s going on-“ he asks, and her hands move, and he feels a prick, like a jab, and the panic sets in in earnest. He’s not going to be an experiment again. He won’t, he won’t, he won’t-

But the sedative is more powerful than his adrenaline, and he feels it kick in. His eyes flutter closed, even as he feels his stomach dropping, and he thinks he sees a black man in a trenchcoat sweep in the room and demand something, but then it’s blackness.

They play this game again when Bucky awakes, and finally they tell him, straight out – he had fallen (he remembers Steve’s face when it happened, shocked, and then nothing) and later, there was an avalanche, there were a series of strange geological events. Bucky’s body (he sits there and listens to this, unbelieving, like he’s divorced from his body somehow when they explain it) was caught in an ice floe, preserved there. A couple of ice-climbers found it that summer while climbing the summit, had called it in, and everyone thought-

Well, when he took a breath, after they chipped him out, everyone was surprised, but somehow Bucky isn’t. He hears something about how his arm had been crushed, and the doctors removed it at the shoulder because there was no saving it. He listens to the explanation from Nick Fury, who is frankly one of the most impressive men Bucky has ever met; it’s like meeting a walking force of nature, like a thunderstorm or a blizzard, impossibly contained in the shape of a human being, and he remembers what Zola did to him. It was only a few months ago. It was seventy years ago. 

Bucky’s going to have a hell of a time wrapping his head around that.

~~~~~~

The technician hates her job, some days. Some days, she deals with it, like anyone else would deal with a terrible job that paid the bills, or even a half-decent job that occasionally mentally stimulated a person. She’s good at it, that’s for sure, and it’s not even like she can say _it’s better than the lunch counter at Woolworths_ , because Woolworths was never an option. She has a PhD in bioengineering and cryogenic engineering, but her breasts still gave her a surprisingly limited range of job options.

Of course, when she started tumbling down this rabbithole, it wasn’t about the bad job – it was about the incredible science, and the sheer magnitude of _opportunity_. They wooed her with lab equipment and funds, seduced her with out-of-this-world research, won her over by pointing out that she would never have to sell her scientific soul to anyone with the last name Stark.

But like any abusive relationship, the cracks came out quickly. It’s not SHIELD. She understands that. There is something sinister here, even under the guise of _for the good of man_. She wants to be rational about it, but she doesn’t believe it, it’s a crock of garbage.

But the worst isn’t the big picture. It’s the little things. The small cruelties. The spying and the lying, sure, that’s bad. But the worst is the asset.

The asset is a big man. She knows that she was hired for this eventuality, groomed for his eventual transport, but it still bothers her. She was the only female engineer in her class. She’s a commodity. She knows that. She understands it in the core of her.

She looks over, nervously, at the chamber. It is a state of the art piece of equipment, beautiful, inside and out. It is everything that she wanted when she was working her ass off, twice as hard as any of the men in her graduating class to prove she was worth it, trying to be everything any professor would kill for. It’s a beautiful, high-tech piece of equipment, and even the red soviet star on it doesn’t mar that beauty, but she feels like it holds an undetonated atom bomb. Like maybe they shouldn’t have been looking at Khrushchev, but instead looking at the snake coiled up inside the workings of the Defense Agency. Maybe that was the point.

They’re waking him up today, and she’s sitting at her desk, quiet. She is always there when they wake him up, because she is part of the team that handles the recalibration of the chamber, in slow increments, to get him off the ice the best way possible.

“Is everything ready?” her team leader asks, and she nods. She sees, out of the corner of her eye, a familiar looking man. She can’t place exactly where she’s seen him – he looks like someone’s soft son, but with a particular charisma to him. She would expect to see someone like him at a baseball game, or at a homecoming event. Not here. Not watching as they wake up the bomb that will blow up this nation.

_Well, that’s dramatic_.

“Wake him up, then,” she’s told, and even as the blood drains from her fingers, she thinks that all it’s doing it making her hands steadier, so when she keys the machine, it goes as smoothly as silk. God, she needs a better job. The nerves are going to undo her.

Everyone watches as the heat (calibrated, of course) seeps into the chamber. “You know the Soviets didn’t want to hand him over? Said he didn’t do well, stateside. They sent him here in ’52 and he lost it. Went AWOL for a week. They found him in Maryland. He’d killed a whole family. It was a mess,” someone behind her says. “But what are they going to keep him for? Everyone knows that he’s probably more likely to be destroyed if they keep him in Moscow.”

“I heard the KGB made a fuss. He’s strictly on loan, fellas,” the young man says, and she can hear the fond smile in his tone. “Don’t get too attached,” he says, and a sudden push at her shoulder makes her realize he’s talking to her. She’s the only woman in the room; the implication is-

Well, the door opens, and she’s embarrassed to say that she understands the implication all the better. The asset is shirtless, asleep. He looks like an angel, perfectly sculpted, his blonde hair long. “We’ll have to give him a haircut, he looks like a hippie,” someone laughs, and that’s when the asset’s eyes open, and she can’t believe how _blue_ they are.

Two of the soldiers on either side of him go to help him move, and he looks at them, inspects them, and she thinks that this must be the way he looks at people before he-

She can’t bring herself to finish the thought, she thinks she’s going to be sick. She doesn’t want to be party to this anymore. She doesn’t want to do this. The asset is disoriented, his face still muddled with a sleepy look, trying to paw his way pasts the soldiers helping him. They’re crooning at him in a sick kind of babytalk, telling him it’s all right, and second by second he gets sharper, more aware of his surroundings. It’s like taking a toy out of packaging, she thinks roughly, when all the plastic is discarded away on the floor to reveal the shiny edges. It makes this entire affair more sickening.

She looks up and the young man – oh, _Alexander Pierce_ , she realizes, putting the name to the face of one of the up and coming young diplomats she reads about in the papers – looks at her, concerned. “Are you all right?” he asks, and she swallows, and shakes her head. “Do you need a glass of water?”

She needs to get out of here, that’s what she needs. She doesn’t know why the asset is in the United States, but suddenly she feels that split of a crisis of conscience. Science isn’t enough. There isn’t anything that is enough. They brought in this terrible weapon – she’s working for the _bad guys_. She needs to get out of this room. “I just need to run to the restroom. Women issues,” she says, giving him her best wan smile. Men, they don’t want to know about women’s issues, she thinks. It’s a guaranteed out. In fact, one of the older men in the room makes a noise, scoffing, asking if it was really necessary to say.

But Alexander Pierce just smiles at her. “Of course,” he says, and he puts his hand on her arm.

But he doesn’t help her. Instead he says something in a thick foreign language, and she realizes too late it’s Russian. The asset’s hands are on either side of her head, and the last thing she sees are his beautiful eyes, dead, looking through her.

~~~~~

Getting used to the modern day is easier than Bucky thought it might be. He has a whole team that hovers around him, and sure, that’s annoying, but it’s less annoying than his fake arm that they try and get him to wear for the first week. That thing is itchy and it doesn’t do anything, and Bucky feels unwieldy with it, crotchety, telling Nick Fury that he’d rather not have it, and plus, he wants to go home to Brooklyn now, thanks.

They don’t let him go.

He’s bored and antsy, but none of what they show him is shocking, just surprising, on the rare trips out of the facility. Times Square is too loud and too bright, a trip of neon and electricity that never featured even in Bucky’s dreams. The agent who takes him, a sweet-faced blonde who wears her hair in a bun and her lips tipped in a maddeningly familiar smile, shows him Manhattan, points out new buildings, and doesn’t tell him off for insisting on walking on the street side of the sidewalk. He keeps his hand to himself. No one stares at him, but then, this is New York.

He meets an agent named Barton who shows up three weeks in and is a frowning, scowling mess, until Bucky gives him a look and a grin. He doesn’t open up, not really, though, until Bucky asks to go back to Brooklyn and Barton takes him up the same winding streets he grew up in, the bare bones of that old tired lady looking freshly painted. Brooklyn is a brand new girl, but Bucky still loves her.

Apparently, so does everyone else, though, because Bucky asks Barton how hard it would be to get his old digs back, and Barton laughs – it’s not possible, and Bucky chokes at the price that Barton quotes for rent. It’s just as well, though. He goes by the old building where his parents lived, and he stands there for a long time. It must have destroyed his mother, he thinks. It must have killed her that her little boy didn’t come home from the war. A teenaged girl comes out of the building and he looks at her, and she looks at him, and then gets on her phone (tiny and pocketed and independent of a landline, and maybe Bucky still thinks that’s amazing even though he has one of his own in his pocket) and mutters something about weirdos before she walks away.

He goes to the apartment that he shared with Steve and it’s a straight stab right into the heart. If anyone should have survived, it was Steve, but maybe it’s better. Bucky had been preparing his whole life for Steve to die before him. He just didn’t think it would happen this way. A fever, a flu, pneumonia, he thinks that Steve might have been taken that way, snatched away. People like Steve, they’re not meant to be kept.

A month goes and Bucky is still being kept by SHIELD, trained about the real world by SHIELD, when there’s a commotion outside the training room that a patient agent is teaching Bucky about the internet in. “What-“ the agent says, and then the door opens.

On the other side is Howard Stark.

No.

Bucky thinks it’s Howard, at first, because he has that same manic energy, that same wild-eyed expression. His eyes are the same shape, his mustache, for crying out loud, is so similar it’s maddening, everything about his face. But this man is a little bit slimmer, maybe, less composed, his face just a little different. Older. But the stamp of Howard Stark is unmistakable.

“Wow I thought you would be. I don’t know. Taller. Seven feet tall or something,” the Stark says, looking at Bucky. “Maybe handsomer? Well, not that you’re not handsome. You have a face for pictures I guess, if they’re in black and white,” he keeps saying, and Bucky isn’t exactly sure what he should be feeling.

“Mr. Stark, I don’t think you’re supposed to-“ the agent begins, but Stark holds up one hand as if to make him stop talking.

But actually, the most impressive thing is that Stark never _stops_. Bucky stands and he can’t quite keep from smiling, because if anything this must have made Howard _crazy_. “You definitely look like you have had enough of being trapped down here, is that true? It’s true. Don’t answer me. Here, I brought you something, courtesy of – well, me, it’s a favor, a favor for the government which makes me feel filthy but-“

That’s when Bucky sees the man behind Stark, who is taller and bigger than Stark in every way but is somehow harder to look at, as if Stark demands all the attention in the room. “You brought me a bodyguard?” he asks, doubtfully.

“What-no, Happy, can you just-“ he moves, and Happy (Bucky is in no place to judge what wackos in the 70s named their kids, he supposes) moves and they do this strange dance for a few minutes, until finally Stark takes a huge bundle from Happy’s arms and puts it on the table. It’s wrapped in cloth, but Bucky suspects-

“Open it. Isn’t that what you do with gifts? Do people from the 1940s not take them? God just open it-“ Stark says.

“Hold your horses,” Bucky snaps, and Stark gives a brief grin, like that snap was really what he was waiting for the entire time. Bucky rolls his eyes, and pulls the material away, and underneath is a massive framework for an arm.

It’s made of metal, but that doesn’t make a difference. “I won’t wear a prosthetic,” Bucky says, “but thanks anyway,” he adds, because he’s trying to be polite.

“I heard about your little refusal to wear a prosthetic and I thought, hey, sure, why not, his choice, but this isn’t a prosthetic, this is an _arm_ , I built it myself and once you go under the knife-“ he doesn’t stop even when Bucky makes a really annoyed noise, because he doesn’t know what that means, “-it’ll be like a regular arm, except _better_.”

“No surgery,” Bucky says, calmly, although inside his heart is pounding a storm in his chest. Just the idea of being strapped to a table again, it’s claustrophobic, he doesn’t remember what happened entirely, but no, no surgery, he can’t do it-

“-don’t just say no, think about it, an arm like a real arm-“ Stark continues, over him, and Bucky gets the impression Stark isn’t actually paying attention to him, that this isn’t about Bucky, this is about the arm.

Bucky just stares at it and tries to smile. “Look,” he says, but Stark is already saying something else, talking about something else entirely, and not to Bucky anymore. It’s a confusing moment, even after Stark leaves and Bucky and his agent babysitter are left alone with the arm and the internet. Bucky just shakes his head. “I’m not getting surgery done,” he says again, like the agent has any say in the matter.

The agent shrugs.

It takes another month, mostly one of Sharon (Sharon, the sweet blonde, Sharon who Bucky flirts with and kisses and it’s nothing like kissing any girl from back in the day, it’s strange because she’s assertive and she shrugs and moves away, and laughs, and Bucky is alright with it) telling him that it wouldn’t be a bad thing, that the surgery would be clean and the best doctors in the world would be doing it, but the idea of someone inside his brain makes Bucky panic a bit inside.

It’s finally Barton – Clint – who convinces him. “You’re a sniper, aren’t you? I grew up on stories about you. You could go back to doing that,” he says, at a quiet conversation while sitting up on the top of the SHIELD building. They like it up there – odd sniper habits, watching the people go on with their lives in the streets below. It’s a different New York, but the people are so much the same. Even up here, Bucky can see them walk around arm in arm, he can see people come together in sweet short kisses, holding hands.

It’s an odd kind of reassuring, but it makes Bucky realize exactly how lonely he feels. “I wasn’t ever into being a soldier for the sake of being a soldier,” he admits. “I don’t think it’s for me. I went with the Howling Commandos because of St-because of Captain America,” he clarifies, careful to say it that way, as if it separated them. He’s found out that Steve is an odd topic, not because he can’t talk about him without feeling like he’s been shot in the heart, but because everyone in 2012 thinks he was spun out of gold. It’s only strange because part of Bucky wants to insist that he loved him first, at the same time that he thinks, _finally_ , everyone else can see what he saw was there all along. It burns him, though, that Steve never got to see it, the way it was supposed to be. That his fame was for being a hero, not for being a dancing monkey. “Maybe I’ll open a cap store,” he says, referring to hats. He can’t get over how no one wears one anymore.

“People like him,” Clint replies, and Bucky realizes he thinks that he’s talking about Steve, and he doesn’t correct him. It’s funny to be able to talk about it with someone. Clint, and some of the other high-level agents, they know who he is, sure, but most people? The official story is that he’s James Barnes, the grandson of James Buchanan Barnes, that there was a girl he got knocked up and she had a kid and, well. It’s not that far-fetched a story. 

“Look, it’s your arm,” Clint points out, finally, “but why not just take it? A free Starktech arm. It’s bound to be good.”

Bucky goes quiet for a long, long time. He thinks about Steve. Steve went through all that procedure, sure, but even before, Steve dealt with doctors poking and prodding him his whole life long, and he never complained about it. Bucky has tried so hard not to think about his best friend, tried so hard to keep it at bay because all he wants, really, is Steve to be there, to advise him, to tell him what to do.

But the thing is, that Steve’s voice is clear in his head. _You’re not afraid of a little surgery, are you?_

And Bucky is.

But it’s not a good enough answer for Steve in his head, so finally he nods, and Clint just turns his head a bit, and nods. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll hold your hand the whole time.”

“Oh, go to hell, Barton,” Bucky replies, but there’s nothing but a smile in it.

~~~~~

“Holy shit-“ he says, twisting, slamming into someone on his way out of the office.

It’s been that kind of day, and really, he has to keep telling himself that the leak of all that information, its not known yet, no one can possibly _know._ He’s a good enough hacker, god, he’s good enough, to keep people guessing for another few hours. Enough time for him to get to the airport.

He needs to get to the airport.

He has contacts in – no, not Russia, it needs to be somewhere quiet and tech-free, somewhere he can disappear. He hears that Namibia has beautiful countryside and very clean cities. Or Mauritius. Remote sections of remote places where he can just-

Just what?

It’s not like he’s got any luck going for him.

He’s driving, trying to get on the freeway, but traffic is terrible. What the hell would he do without a computer, anyway? Take up marijuana farming? He has a black thumb and only about 20k to his name in liquid funds, anyway. That might go far in a place like Sierra Leone, but fuck, he heard they’re having an ebola outbreak-

The car slams into his and he stammers “ _Fuck_ ,” because he does _not_ need this right now, god knows he’s stressed enough already.

He doesn’t even get a chance to think more than that before it slams into his car again, and he realizes, no, shit, no-

He looks around and no one else seems to think this is strange, no one else seems to see, shit, he can’t call for help-

He doesn’t see the gun.

He doesn’t see anything.

~~~~~~

In the end, really, what else was he supposed to do? It’s not like he has any marketable skills outside of hauling heavy things – made easier by the arm and the revelation of the modified super soldier serum that apparently he was injected with during that hazy, heavy torture session with Zola.

And the arm, too.

He’s still fuzzy on the details, but he knows more than they think he does. He knows, for instance, that Stark and the neurosurgeon who did the operation replaced a whole portion of his spine with Starktech metal, as well as his entire shoulder. It’s a strange thing, when he wakes up and he sees it, when he lifts his hands and there are two of them but one is shiny and plated and cold.

It’s even weirder when he spends hours - _hours_ that he should be sainted for – with Stark, with Stark poking and prodding at him. He spends hours, too, with a doctor ( _physical therapist_ ) who spends all her time making Bucky do things like close his hand into a fist, like this is a great feat. She thinks that he’s a special ops who lost an arm in Iraq. He doesn’t correct her.

The thing is, it is. It’s painful, the arm, in a way he didn’t expect. It’s not heavy, but it’s constant, a thing he’s not used to, it doesn’t feel like his arm at first. The feedback it gives him is a headache. Holding onto things is either too slippery because his grip isn’t strong enough, or he’s crushing rocks.

The first time he did that, he demanded they take it off, they take the damn thing off him, and for the first time he thought no, this isn’t what he thought it was going to be, they turned him into a lab rat just like Zola. Fury had to talk him down, to calm him down, and Fury is terrible at that sort of thing.

But he gets used to the weight of it, the feel of it, the pressure sensors and the cleaning. He gets to remember the delicate movement of fingers, the way his hands could move.

(There is a part of him that will miss the ability to hold the hand of another person. Steve, he thinks, Steve could have handled this better, Steve was always a little more prickly, but Bucky loved the warmth of another person’s skin against his. He still has one, but he won’t be able to run both hands over someone else’s skin ever again.)

(Not that he’s really in the mood to hold anyone, almost ever. Even kissing Sharon has lost the magic.)

So what else was he supposed to do? He dresses in black, and Clint and Sharon teach him what they do – and eventually he meets Natasha, who gives him smirky smiles and runs him ragged, but who he surprises one day when she’s doing her usual series of acrobatics, twisting around him, he catches her with his metal arm and holds her close. “You all right there,” he asks, and she tries to throw him.

He thinks that probably she would have managed, expect that with the metal arm and the anchor he probably weighs closer to three hundred pounds than he does to one-sixty, and she can’t get the right leverage. He spins her ‘round, like she’s not a sparring partner but a dance one, and she turns with a balletic grace, and he grins. “Want to go to a dance hall with me?”

“No more dance halls,” she tells him, but then she’s grabbing his hands and they’re doing a regular foxtrot, and for the first time his smile feels like it’s 1940 all over again. It’s almost a shock to the system when they stop and he looks and his hand is metal. “Your cover is slipping,” she tells him, after, and he realizes that she didn’t know, she wasn’t supposed to know. But now she does.

It’s a nice thing, really.

And the rest of it, well.

If he keeps drowning himself in training, keeps taking missions, accepts the designation of _Agent Barnes_ , accepts every dirty job he’s handed and doesn’t complain. In return he gets a paycheck, a monthly prodding from the doctor to make sure his arm is taking, and the ability to not think about the past.

(That last one is a killer, but Bucky is nothing if not practical.)

~~~~~~

When he joined Hydra, almost three years ago, he definitely did not think that this was going to be a side – benefit? Perk? Strange, almost hallucinatory occurrence? – whatever it is, he didn’t think it would be happening. This morning, Rumlow called him and told him to get dressed and get moving, because he would be on escort duty for some special weapon.

Matthew Denisof is not a weapons specialist, he’s a handler, so it was a strange phone call, and after getting dressed and coming in and reporting, his SHIELD badge sliding him into the building without a blip (it’s so – covert, he thinks, it’s strange still) he’s led down, down into a side of the building he didn’t know was there.

They walk for a long time, and then finally they get to place where Rumlow is waiting. “Denisof,” he says, turning, looking away. “we sent the weapon alone, last mission, but then the weapon went AWOL and we had to spend a full week hunting it down.” Rumlow says this casually, as if this makes total and absolute sense. “We were warned, and it shouldn’t happen again – there was a mistake made with one of the technicians,” he adds, with a hitch in his tone that says _one that won’t even have the opportunity to be repeated_ , “and we’ve adjusted protocol, but it needs a handler.”

“Sir,” Denisof says, as if any of that made any sense at _all_. What the hell is this weapon? What kind of weapon goes _AWOL_?

Rumlow just gives a very brief nod of his head and turns, and opens a door. Inside is a team of technicians who are moving like bees, totally unaware and uncaring of the two agents in their midst. In the middle of all that action is a man strapped to a chair. The first thing that Denisof thinks is that the man is enormous, with wide shoulders and the look of someone who could do some serious damage, but then, that’s everyone who is an active agent, really. “Here it is,” Rumlow says. “have you heard of the Winter Soldier?”

There’s a pause, and Denisof almost has to catch himself from laughing. “That’s a myth, isn’t it?” he asks, and the most impressive part of it is that he manages to sound like he is actually wondering, and not that he’s laughing at the mere idea of the Winter Soldier being real. He takes another look at the man strapped down. The man is watching him, his eyes brilliant blue, but he’s muzzled like a dog.

No.

It’s more elaborate than that. It’s headgear that covers his mouth and nose and down his neck, almost like armor. Denisof can see that it covers most of his head, too, like a helmet, but there’s a portion that’s uncovered, where he can see that the man is shockingly blonde. The armor of the muzzle matches the armor he’s wearing, and it all looks _heavy_ , unwieldy in a way that make Denisof shift just thinking about it.

“It’s not a myth,” Rumlow says. “But it is a pain in the ass,” he adds, nodding to the techs, who start unstrapping the man. “It’s good, let me be clear: it’s volatile. Don’t think of it as a person,” he says, as the Soldier moves down from where he’s kept. The Soldier reaches his - _its_ \- arms out, and guns are handed over, grenades, and it begins to equip itself. Denisof is already not comfortable with calling it a thing, but he’ll get used to it, he guesses. “You have to think of it as a weapon. One that’ll go off. Be clear when you speak to it. Only speak Russian,” Rumlow says, and Denisof knows why, then, they chose him, his mother was Russian and his is flawless, “and don’t ever hit it. Not in the face, not in the arm, don’t hit it. Don’t yell. Clear, crisp orders only.”

Denisof is handed a mission file; inside is a description, something about a political assassination, Denisof won’t be physically present at the job itself, but instead he’ll be handling the Soldier, which will be on its own. It looks cut-and-dry, nothing complicated. He looks back at the Soldier, which is looking out into the distance with that hundred-yard soldier stare, perfectly armed. “Anything else?”

“Don’t take the muzzle off except to feed it,” Rumlow says. “Doggie bites.”

He says it casually but then the Soldier turns and looks at Rumlow, and in its eyes is a cold, pitiless expression, like he’s sizing Rumlow up. And then it looks away, and blinks slowly, and Denisof realizes no, it’s not like a dog, it’s like a massive cat, a tiger or a lion, the kind of cat that can take a man’s arm off without any effort at all, but has found Rumlow not worth the trouble. At least not worth the trouble today.

The coldness of it sends a shiver up Denisof’s spine, something he hasn’t felt since he was a trainee, waiting for his higher ups to decide if he was worth Hydra’s time.

And the thing is that really, it is the easiest handling that Denisof has ever done. The weapon doesn’t speak expect to let Denisof know its needs, like food, and never asks for clarification. The mission is programmed into its head. Denisof has camera and audio connection to the weapon, and when it goes off, it’s like-

It’s strange how smooth and how seamless it goes. The weapon moves with an economy of motion that Denisof didn’t actually think was possible – every movement is carefully planned, and only the necessary motion is carried out. It is silent, despite being so heavy, and it knows how to use _fear_ , which is probably the only thing that hangs heavy in Denisof’s gut. It’s in the mission outline, that the target needs to know it’s coming, before the target is taken out, but that doesn’t mean that Denisof thinks that the Soldier would be so effective, that it would be able to make just the right amount of noise, be able to create just the right atmosphere, to be able to slowly and meticulously wait until the target was babbling for mercy-

Actually, Denisof is pleased – no, that’s not right, _relieved_ when the target it dead and they’re back in transport. “Do you need to drink something?” Denisof asks in soft, clear Russian, and the weapon pauses as if it’s doing a system analysis – no, that’s isn’t right, really. It’s not a robot, no matter what Rumlow thinks or how he wants him to treat the weapon. A robot wouldn’t need a handler, a robot wouldn’t need to be escorted like this. A robot wouldn’t have a notion of _fear_ , or how to use it, or have an opinion on it, which the weapon clearly does. Denisof can tell, with just the way that the weapon has decidedly shut off after, how it closes its eyes like it’s tired, quiet, exhausted.

Finally the weapon nods, and Denisof hands it a bottle of water. The muzzle has to come off, and it’s a strange thing – the last time Denisof did this, took the muzzle off, he immediately turned away as if he was looking at a naked man and not just a man’s face.

This time he looks.

When Denisof was a little boy, back when he was tucked into a corner of the foster system because his mother was too drunk to take care of him, he was in a foster home where the mom would let the kids watch television, but she thought that modern cartoons were all immoral and terrible. She had old VHS copies of the Captain America movies from the 40s, and Denisof used to watch them, one after the other. Captain America was his very favorite, and he had forgotten about them until right now.

The man (a man now, not a weapon, he should have known, he should have _listened_ ) under the muzzle drinking water and watching Denisof with a look that knows more than it doesn’t is, without a doubt, Captain America. There is no ambiguity. There isn’t a single chance that Denisof is wrong. “Cap?” he says, and he feels like a little boy again. Like someone who knew that right and wrong were black and white, someone different from who he is now, living between worlds in acrid shades of smoke.

There is a flicker, suddenly, and Cap drops the bottle, his hand going right to Denisof’s throat. It’s training, training and quick thinking that makes Denisof manage to yelp “ _Hold_!” in Russian, and for a moment that overrides whatever it was, whatever the trigger did, long enough for Denisof to bark out – not yell, but clearly speak – a series of Russian orders, for him to sit, to stay, to obey, and Cap moves away, sits, stays, obeys, but there’s a war going on behind those blue eyes.

Denisof muzzles him again, quickly, like leashing a dog, and he settles back into his seat.

He doesn’t tell anyone what happened. He doesn’t want to admit it, and he doesn’t want to face up to the shame of it, the shame of having done what he did to Captain America, or the shame that even now, in Hydra, it means something to him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please please note: the tag that say non-linear narrative means that while I am structuring it so all of Bucky's POV's ARE linear, outside POV may or MAY NOT be. I know that can be confusing, but I want to make sure you guys get what's happening (although I'm sure you're all brilliant enough to do so, and I am just worrying over nothing)
> 
> Okay?
> 
> Okay.

Bucky hates missions in the rain the most. It makes Natasha call him something in Russian, that after a year of Russian classes he learns means _kitten_ , and he can’t really dispute that. Although, to be fair, he tells her, he is a lot more like a dog, than a cat. Loving, and dedicated, and loyal. Also he doesn’t take warming up for weeks to like a person. 

(Steve, he’s thinking about Steve, but he’s always thinking about Steve)

It’s a late night, this mission, and Bucky is bundled up in his sniper’s nest, but while his uniform may be waterproof his hair still isn’t, and it’s plastered to his head with icy rain. This was a bad idea. Who the hell decides to put out a black ops mission to Normandy in November? Why is Fury doing this to him? This feels like a punishment for going a little AWOL during the whole Chitauri alien and Norse gods invasion, but really, what was he supposed to do? Barton was compromised! Fury was only lucky that between him and Natasha, she had her head on enough to agree that Bucky should be the one to pin him down; he had the muscle and the weight to do it. 

Besides, that was water under the bridge. The Chitauri invaded, the Avengers (really, the _Avengers_ , like they’re in a comic book, it’s actually kind of exciting, even though strictly speaking, Bucky isn’t one of them, he was only second string. But second string Avenger is better than nothing at all) sent them packing, and New York got cleaned up. 

(On the list of things Bucky doesn’t talk about, number who-can-keep-count,-not-Bucky: how Steve died to save New York and how Manhattan got destroyed seventy years later, and Bucky was there to watch it happen, and how it wedges a hole into the heart of him, the idea of a sacrifice being for nothing searing away at his soul.)

So this entire mad caper with Natasha down in the heart of some crazy mob scheme, and him up in the nest giving her intel and backup while sitting in the icy rain, freezing his nuts off, that’s something that Fury really needs to look into. Bucky did his time slogging through French rain, which in his vastly educated opinion is colder, sharper, and pointier than American rain. He didn’t actually want to do it again.

“ _Everything good_?” he hears in his ear - that’s Maria, who’s acting as their handler, eyes in the sky, and general boss. 

Natasha can’t reply, and it’s not like she has a lift out _anyway_ , so Bucky takes over. “It’s freezing up here,” he says, knowing that Maria will take that as a _yes_ , and mutters, “this cannot be good for my arm.”

“ _Stark told us it was good until -160, so don’t whine,_ ” Maria responds with her no-nonsense tone of voice; not scolding or amused, but more disinterested in the actual conversation than anything else. “ _Does Natasha have eyes on the target?_ ”

“She’s had hands on the target for the last fifteen minutes, but the guy apparently isn’t giving up the ghost, and it’s starting to piss her off. You know how she hates these date scenarios,” Bucky says back, watching her through the scope. After a year of being partnered with her, he can predict her moods by the way her mouth tightens or the way that she holds herself. “The guy better give up quick or - wait-”

“ _Barnes_ -” Maria says, but he’s not paying attention to her anymore; he’s got eyes on a different person, moving through the rain on the street. Whoever it is, Bucky can barely keep up with him; he moves right in the shadows, and he’s covered in black, head to toe. And whoever it is moves _fast_ , too, almost too fast for Bucky’s scope to keep up, but one of the benefits of the serum, apparently, was enhanced night vision (thanks, Zola, _bitterly_ ). It lets him keep sight of the person right up until they disappear into the building where the party is happening.

Bucky swears and turns his comm on. “Widow,” he says, so Natasha knows he’s not blabbering at Maria because he’s bored, “you’ve got a guest incoming. Can’t say who they are.”

He catches sight of Natasha again, and she’s laughing at something the target is saying, her smile just this side of brittle, before she moves from view. Bucky swears again and makes a snap decision. “Going silent,” he tells Maria, and drops his comm to off, even as he can hear Maria tell him _no, Barnes, don’t do it_.

But he’s not leaving Natasha alone (although she’s more than capable, he thinks to himself) because part of him still can’t let anything bad happen to her - not because she’s a woman, but because she’s his _partner_ , his responsibility. Some doctor told him that transference wasn’t a healthy coping mechanism, and Bucky told him to shove it. He dismantles his rifle in a second and straps it to his back, and shimmies down the side of the building he’s on, blessing, for a moment, the squatness of these old buildings.

By the time he gets down there and across the street, he can hear Maria screaming - well, okay, not screaming, she doesn’t scream, she is way too composed to scream - _suggesting strongly_ that Bucky not go AWOL, that he go back to his post, his post being up in his nest and not wherever he’s headed without so much as a glove to cover his metal arm.

He doesn’t tell her anything, though, he just slips into the building. The noise of the party is loud; it’s enough cover for him. He hasn’t mastered Barton and Natasha’s silent prowl yet, and it’s always been all right because he’s always been the eyes in the sky, but now he’s just happy for the cover. 

He spots whoever it is - the person who is clearly as black ops as he and Natasha - moving down the hall. For being so big, he moves _fast_ , and even more silently than anything Natasha has ever managed. The only reason Bucky can see him, he thinks, is because Bucky has the added benefit of enhanced night vision and the good luck to have caught him.

The man stops for a moment, not paying attention to Bucky, one gloved hand opening a door - a door that is _away_ from the party, and Bucky crouches low to watch. There’s something that isn’t right about this, something that says trouble. A second later, the man comes back out carrying-

Carrying-

Holy shit, Bucky thinks, and even his internal 1940s censor is too shocked to go off. He’s carrying a _kid_ , a little girl, one gloved hand clamped over her mouth, even though she’s utterly passed out.

 _What the hell_ , Bucky thinks, and he doesn’t care if she’s the daughter of the most powerful mob boss on the planet, there is no way he’s going to watch this and do nothing-

His brain doesn’t catch up to him until later, much later, after the fight. Bucky doesn’t want to do this with a gun, that would be a _very bad idea_ , even if the kid is drugged, which he thinks she must be. So he takes stock of the situation, and aims for the thigh with his left arm.

The problem is that when he should feel the hit, the hit doesn’t actually come. He only sees a black leg move smoothly out of the way, and when he looks up he’s looking right at a pair of night-vision goggles and a black mask that covers all the man’s features. 

He takes a kick right to the stomach, then. _Stupid_ he thinks to himself, about himself, and _shit_ , that kick does the trick. He’s winded, but there’s nothing about being winded that would actually stop him, not from this. He can’t just let this go, so he sucks in oxygen, ignores the searing pain of it refilling his lungs, and reaches for an ankle with his right hand.

He just misses it, the man moving just a touch too fast, so Bucky ups the ante and gets up on his feet. The ensuing fight is both silent and embarrassingly one-sided - for starters, whoever this guy is he’s good enough to keep the kid both from touching the ground and from waking up and even handicapped with her in his arms, he kicks like a fury, his legs a flurry of motion and violence. It doesn’t help that he doesn’t seem at all hindered by any act of conscience - he may not let the kid touch the ground, but he’s sure not treating her kindly, and Bucky’s handicapped by not being able to aim for anywhere that might risk the man dropping her.

Bucky can still hear the sounds of the party, and he knows - he _knows_ \- that if he raises the alarm people will come, but it’ll put Natasha, not mention the whole mission, at risk, so he’s on his own. There’s a reason they’re partners, and it’s the ability to make these choices. Bucky always chooses Natasha - _always_. 

Clearly, whoever this man is, he’s done, because with one hand he’s flinging the girl up, hoisting her into one enormous arm, and with the other he’s sliding a knife-

(once, Bucky would have wondered _where did it come from_ but after a year of training he knows exactly where, the exact shape of it pressing against the man’s inner wrist)

-and throwing it with horrible, accurate aim to lodge right in the space between the plate of Bucky’s metal arm and his chest. The pain is sharp and searing, and Bucky hisses with it, but when he looks up, the man is gone. He doesn’t pull the knife out, but goes to the window, and he’s lost sight of him.

It’s a minute later that he realizes, when he looks in the little girl’s room, that in that brief silence, those minutes between him entering the room and coming out, that man took out her bodyguards and a nanny, who are all lying in pools of blood. None of them screamed. None of them even had the time to try.

~~~~~~

Every single day of the week, Alexa leaves the house at five in the morning for a six a.m. shift at the hospital. It’s a rough commute, that early, but it affords her two things - a painless ride on the bus home, at two PM when there is no one heading back from downtown to Silver Spring, and the ability to pick up her kids and help them with their homework right after school. Sure, it means that her mom has to take them to school in the morning, but her mom never complains, and Alexa thinks she likes it. 

It’s the best that she can do until her husband gets back stateside from deployment, anyway. 

The other thing is that the bus ride there, in the dark, twinkling lights of D.C., isn’t really so bad. The city never feels quiet except in the very early hours, when the only people who are awake are the ones who work in health care; the nurses and the doctors.

On the bus, she takes her phone out - there’s something in the news about the Avengers, or Iron Man, she doesn’t follow those things. Nathaniel has an Iron Man figure his daddy sent him for his sixth birthday, and Alexa frowned about it, but it was harmless enough she supposes, even if she does think that Tony Stark is not part of the solution to any problem, especially the ones of his own making. 

She sees the fires in the distance and she wonders what they are, but the bus turns away from the road. A man gets on the bus, a few stops down, then; he’s not one of the regulars and everyone on the bus shifts a little. These five am buses in from Silver Spring, they all know each other, in a way. They know what they look like.

The man doesn’t look like them. He looks tired, a little confused, and when he sits, all of his weight goes with him. He has a lot of weight to him, too - heft, the kind of man who would be called _obese_ at the hospital. He doesn’t look like he’s very happy to be on this bus, and Alexa tries to ignore him.

Except that he has a suit on, and there’s a tiny pin of the American Flag on his lapel, and they’re so close to the Triskelion right now. Alexa isn’t overly paranoid, she doesn’t think, anyway, but after that mess in New York, with the aliens, and then the mess in London with Thor, well, it’s not paranoia, really. 

She shifts and the man’s eyes open, and he looks at her. He looks grim, and she turns to look at the fires. A moment later, the man is sitting next to her. “Hi,” he says, even though he is so tired, like he’s been working all night long. “Sorry to bother you, but do you have the time?”

She doesn’t say anything at first. Men, she thinks, they’re so stupid about this sort of thing. Usually she ascribes them to being harmless, really, but what if this is the time, what is this is man who isn’t? Why don’t they ever think of how they make women on buses feel when they do this? “Five seventeen,” she replies, finally. 

He takes a breath, and almost laughs. “Hell of a time to be awake,” he says, “are you a nurse?”

Alexa clutches her bag tighter. Why is he talking to her? “At GWU Hospital,” she tells him, even though she knows she shouldn’t. She can hear her voice tightening, she knows that it sounds like she wants to finish this conversation, and it’s because she does. If he asks her where she lives, she’ll hit him in the face with her bag - there are rocks in the bottom because Nathaniel lives to hand her pebbles, and sometimes she doesn’t take them out.

He opens his mouth, to say something, but nothing comes out. Instead he looks ahead, and his eyes grow wide. She turns to look and she sees something in the street - a shadow, maybe, no, a person, who the bus driver hasn’t spotted yet. Then there’s a snap and a bang, and the sound of _crunching_ , a wet pop. 

Alexa has been a trauma nurse for five years, she knows exactly what to do when she sees blood, and she’s not squeamish, but the person behind her, who has the man’s brains splattered over her suit clearly doesn’t. The bus squeals to a halt; it’s a blessing that there’s no accident; a function of it being so early. There’s screaming and panic, and Alexa is the only one who has enough sense to look up, at the trajectory of the bullet (like her husband taught her one day on the shooting range) to see where the shooter was - right in front of them. The hole is in the windshield.

Someone throws up, and she reaches into her bag, gets her phone, and calls 911.

~~~~~~

Bucky hates nothing more than the cellular phone.

This is only true sometimes. The truth is that when he’s bored out of his wits, Angry Birds and Candy Crush have proven to be an addicting rush of puzzle and chaos, just the kind of thing that Bucky responds to. After learning how to text, he finds that it’s really the best way to keep up with his tiny circle of people who he talks to (only some of them qualifying as friends). But he also thinks it’s kind of stupid, proof that people in the future need some real kind of crisis, because like the television, all it does is get into your head, insidiously, and never lets you go. 

The internet, he thinks, is the biggest time-waster of them all, no matter what Stark says about how it connects the globe. There is nothing less trustworthy about a new piece of technology than the endorsement of a Stark. 

And the worst thing about it is that the cellular phone affords absolutely no respect to his sleeping schedule. This is made worse by the fact that his phone is provided by SHIELD, and despite him being able to upload every app known to man on it, he’s not allowed to turn the damned thing off, which is why, despite the fact that it’s five-thirty in the morning the day after he had been up until three on assignment, it’s practically screaming in his face.

He feels that first shot of adrenaline and then he’s huffing, trying to get oxygen as he picks up the phone. “Hello? Hello?” he manages, barely. “What the hell, do you know what time it is?”

“We sent Romanoff to pick you up,” Fury snaps, “so get dressed.”

Bucky looks down - he’s still in his blacks, having fallen face-first into bed in them. That hasn’t happened since Normandy, and that was two months ago. “God, someone better be _dying_ ,” he says.

Once they get to the scene, Bucky regrets even thinking that.

Rumlow greets them, slipping police badges into their hands. “No one knows what happened,” he says, and Bucky manages a grunt, but then Rumlow, bless him, signals someone with coffee over, and the bitter blackness of it matches Bucky’s current mood. “They all keep saying one second he was talking to this nurse, the next his brains were all over the woman behind him.” Natasha doesn’t look even remotely plussed about this; she’s as cool as if she were just fished out of the Hudson. She heads over to where the medics are dealing with the ambulance, with the corpse, and she takes the dead man’s coat like it means something to her, something intensely precious.

Bucky looks at the bus, at the people sitting on the curb, wrapped in army blankets and huddling close to each other. He recognizes that war-torn civilian look, it’s too familiar to be comfortable. Only one of the civilians, in nurse scrubs, looks like she’s up and alert, not covered in a blanket, and even though she has dark hair and olive-toned skin, the first thing that comes to Bucky’s mind is _Sarah Rogers_. They have that same no-nonsense look, like this is a huge waste of time.

God, Steve has - _had_ \- that exact same expression.

So Bucky turns the charm on. “Ma’am,” he says, smiling. Natasha tells him that his 1940s manners can charm the pants off of every woman in the country, and he’s counting on that now. “I know you probably have gone over this more times than you care to, but I was hoping you could go over it again with me, please.”

She gives him a look, and it really is like looking at Sarah Rogers, because everything in that expression says _I know what you’re up to, Bucky Barnes, don’t think you can pull one over on me._ But she sighs heavily and shakes her head. “It was really fast,” she tells him, and she describes how the man started talking to her, and how when she looked up she saw a shadow that she thought might have been a person before the bullet went through the man’s skull. 

Bucky looks over at the bus, still pulled over, and at the street, and his brain starts to think in overtime. Bucky has a gift for this: deconstructing sniping scenes, building plausible scenarios in his head. He knows there’s a science to it - it’s met enough in the way of SHIELD analysts to know that they are _a lot_ smarter than he could claim to ever be (even if he is smarter than people seem to think he is) and they know the right math. But what Bucky has is pure talent - it makes him one of the best snipers that SHIELD has, and it makes him good at this - looking at the crime scene, even when the crime scene is in pieces, and figuring out what happened.

“Where did it splatter?” he asks, serious now, because he gets the feeling that even if he were in the mood to coddle this woman, she’s not the kind of lady who needs coddling about this sort of this. Make no mistake, Bucky knows the difference. He’s met enough in the way of spies, soldiers, and nurses in his lifetime to know when to mince words.

The woman looks at him for a long time, like she’s sizing him up again, and finally she just purses her lips together. “A bulk was on the sternum,” she says, finally, and Bucky nods, heading up to the bus. 

Rumlow joins him as he heads up, the look on his face half neutral and half-irritated. Bucky knows exactly what that look is; Rumlow is only in a sour mood like that when he’s been woken up, and Bucky feels for him. “What have you got, Barnes?” he asks, following Bucky in, as Bucky looks at the hole in the windshield, and then over to where the techs are scoping the body.

The techs are all SHIELD; Bucky knows because he knows them. They’re taking measurements and looking busy, and Bucky doesn’t know what they’re doing but it looks important enough that he figures if he interrupts, he’ll get a reaming over it. He looks over at Rumlow. “Who was the mark?”

Rumlow tilts his head. “SHIELD operative,” he replies, crossing his arms over his chest, and looking out at the hole in the windshield. “That’s all they’ll tell me.”

Bucky looks at the hole, and back at the seat, and measures the angles in his head. He can almost see the shooter - not literally, but the shape of whoever it was. The shooter was someone tall, and fast, and lethally accurate. “A handgun?” Bucky asks then, too, because he’s trying to calculate the distance before a bullet starts to wobble, before accuracy is measured in millimeters of recoil.

“We sent the slugs out, but I think so,” Rumlow says, and he’s looking even more intensely at Bucky now. Bucky just gives him a flat look back. He doesn’t have anything against Rumlow, not really. He’s a serious guy, but they’ve gone drinking and it hasn’t been so bad, but sometimes he gets this funny look, like he’s sizing Bucky up, and Bucky can’t say he particularly likes it. “What’s going on in your head, Barnes?”

Bucky knows when to keep his trap shut. It’s the gut feeling that got him through all of school with a friend like Steve Rogers, back in the day when a teacher’s word meant something (he hears that kids these days get away with all kinds of things that would have earned him a tanned hide) and it’s the gut feeling that got him promoted to Sergeant. People think that he has a big mouth, because he _talks_ , but so much of it is just empty words filling up hot air.

It’s the gut feeling that keeps the man in Normandy a secret, burning the back of Bucky’s head. “Just trying to figure out how the hell this guy managed that shot, that’s all,” he says, even though that’s only part of it.

Another part, a more logical, deeper part, is wondering what the hell this guy did to deserve getting shot like that, and who the hell knew about it. SHIELD operatives don’t exactly live casual lives of leisure, he knows, but he’s never thought that getting on a bus was a death sentence.

And getting on a bus, at five in the morning, in this part of town? Where was the guy going? Why a bus? Why not drive? 

(Look who’s a rich jerk, his brain adds, helpfully, and Bucky has to shake his head to get the words out)

Bucky just looks over and sees Natasha, who standing in the road, looking back at him. “Gotta go,” he says to Rumlow, and trots over to her. “So?” he asks, crossing his arms.

“He’s some kind of technician,” she tells him, and she’s looking up at the bus, too. Finally she just shakes her head. “Don’t think too hard about it.”

This is one of the reasons that he likes Natasha. They’re both good at this, at thinking too much, but at the same time, they both know that there has to be a place where they check out. Bucky has never been much for worrying a bone until it falls apart; that was always other people in his life. Natasha, though, she’s not worried about it. Or maybe, if she is, she doesn’t show it. 

It’s not until later, when they’re back in the car together, that Bucky looks over at her. “What did you get from the guy’s jacket?” he asks, casually, looking straight ahead as she drives. A moment later he tips his head a bit, to look at her face from the side of his eye. She’s pursing her lips in that smile, that smile that says she’s probably not spilling, but that she’s impressed he cottoned on. “I know you got something,” he adds, feeling a grin of his own spreading over his features. 

“So, tell me about your date with Amy,” she says back, her smile widening a bit. All right. She’s not spilling. Fair’s fair, Bucky guesses. “She told me you went to see a screening of _Some Like it Hot_.”

“I didn’t know the late fifties got so progressive,” Bucky replies, finally. “And it was fine, but a gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.”

“I don’t see a gentleman here,” Natasha teases, and God, Bucky loves it when they talk like this, it’s relaxing, in a way. “Anyway, she already said that you just walked her back to her apartment, gave her a kiss on the cheek, and went on your way.”

“These 21st century girls are going to destroy my reputation,” Bucky mutters back, and Natasha laughs.

~~~~~~

It’s almost midnight, and Anna is still awake, pouring over some document or another.

It’s not fair, really, and Lydia knows it, when she gets upset like this. This is what she signed up for when she agreed to live with her. There was something about it; Anna works every day in a concrete world of numbers and facts and pattern analysis, and Lydia, well, she works in soft muted pastels and harsh chalk lines, she spends her days immersed in beauty.

She knows that she signed up for this, when Anna told her that she wanted Lydia to be sure, that living together would be harder than just hiding their relationship from the outside world. With everything going on around them, even in London, there’s still an element of _taboo_. Anna’s mother eyes them, sometimes, with that sharp Carter gaze, and Lydia feels like she’s going to dissolve under the weight of the scrutiny, or disappear in the sea of lies where the crashing waves echo the words, _she’s my flatmate_ and _she’s my friend_ instead of _she’s the love of my life_ , the words Anna whispers into the curves of Lydia’s skin in the dark of night, in the bed that is theirs in reality, but on paper, only belongs to Lydia.

It’s almost midnight and Lydia wants to go to sleep but Anna is still awake, and she’s never been good at disconnecting from her, as if there is some kind of tether from her heart into Anna’s brain: the two muscles that they use the most, respectively. Because of that, then, Lydia is sitting in front of her easel. She’s always been good at disappearing into the world of art, and she has a showing in a week that Anna doesn’t know about yet. There’s been a lot going on at Vauxhall Cross, and Anna has been under a lot of stress, but even Lydia knows that there’s talk of a promotion and a raise, and they agreed that the next promotion and raise would lead to maybe a home on the seaside, a quiet place to vacation, maybe in France or Spain, where they could hold hands on the street and not worry about Anna’s employers seeing.

There is the sound of a thump that comes from the kitchen, and Lydia thinks that the cats must be fighting again, even though she doesn’t hear Anna’s usual sharp rebuke, as if one can sharply rebuke a cat.

The painting that Lydia is working on, or maybe better, the painting that Lydia is discovering, this work of art that’s unveiling itself in blues and greens and the occasionally sweeping burst of yellow and orange isn’t the kind that’s popular in feminist circles right now; the righteous fury of the modern woman, 1978 painted in angry furious swaths of color and light. Instead it feels like painting memory, like some kind of homage to a past she’s not sure exists, soft and almost landscape. There’s a woman in this painting, sort of, in lush curves and broad strokes, the suggestion of woman in fat, beautiful brushstrokes. She’s embracing another woman, but that woman is harder to see. It is not finished, but the way it looks, everything about it, the final touches are eluding her.

Lydia thinks she will call it _Anna_.

It’s the Waffles who surprises her by zooming under her chair – Waffles is her cat, and Pancake is Anna’s, officially, but really they are almost identical gray tabbies, except that Waffles has a splotch of black on his right ear like someone dropped a blot of paint on it, and it never cleared off.

He’s terrified, which is strange, because Waffles is only really afraid if someone he doesn’t know is in the flat. “What the matter?” she asks, pulling him up to her lap, but in cat fashion he only wants to be under her chair, the only place in the flat where there is any kind of secure _under_ that isn’t the bedroom, and the bedroom doors are closed.

She stands, then, and turns, calling, “Anna-“ but she’s stopped short by a man in the doorway to her studio.

Lydia freezes, and immediately her arms go around her torso. “There’s nothing valuable here,” she says, and her voice is shaking and trembling like an earthquake has possessed her. “But there are about twenty pounds in my purse,” she says, even though a part of her doesn’t think he is here to rob them. He looks like something out of a film, dressed in black, with a strange kind of mask over his face. He’s looking right through her, and she’s shaking.

She backs up, backs up, backs up until she hits a wall and he moves closer, heavy and weighted, a big man, an enormous man. She closes her eyes and thinks, god, she’s a coward, she thinks, god, why is this happening, she thinks, god, I’m sorry I’m a sinner but please do not use him to punish me – but there is nothing, no violence, no violation. Lydia opens her eyes and sees him, standing in front of her easel. There is something in his eyes, then, pain, or hate, or _something_ that she cannot fully read and does not entirely understand. There is something there that is more human than she wants to face.

He stands there a moment, and reaches down for a paintbrush, and her easel, and loads it. She reaches a hand to her mouth to keep from shouting out, because maybe this is the next worst thing to _violation_ , to destroy her art, this is the next worst, because she is too frightened to speak out as he puts the brush to the easel.

They are there a long time, him, painting, standing, not looking at her, and her tense. Her body cannot possibly be the same after this. After this, her body will have seized up, her muscles will have frozen into this shape of terror.

Then, after what seems like a long time, he sets the brush down and steps away, and then looks over at Lydia, tilts his head, and _leaves_ , right through the door.

The second he’s gone she lets out a sob, pressing her face against her hand and whimpering against it.

And that is the moment she remembers. Like waking from a horrible dream, she moves. She should run but she can’t, she can’t run to confirm it, she can’t just run because she’s still tense and terrified, she can’t run because the longer she takes, the longer she can imagine Anna’s face in her head, unbruised and unbroken and fine, smiling. There is peace in her, too, in a way, in the way she has only known when she unveils the art the universe presses through her fingers.

Anna looks like she is asleep over her desk, but she is not asleep. Her hands are curved around a pen, and Lydia realizes she did not see death coming.

After the police come and the corners take Anna’s body away for the autopsy, after Lydia’s sobs have reduced to quiet whimpers of exhaustion, after Anna’s boss comes to ask questions about the man in black, after Lydia’s been given a sedative and told to go to sleep, after all of that, Lydia makes her way back to her easel and looks, for the first time, at the destruction the man has wrought.

But it’s not there. There is nothing clumsy in how the painting looks now. It is perfect, it has what was lacking before, the composition is complete. There’s nothing left to do to it.

This is death, Lydia thinks, as she sits in her chair and stares at it. This is death, that comes and gives you a gift you thought you wanted, but takes everything you are away from you.

She will call it _Anna_.

~~~~~

There are a lot of things that Bucky wishes, when the night is dark and the lights are down. He wishes that he had told Steve, in no uncertain terms, with the solidity of the ground below them and the cold that followed them everywhere in Europe, exactly how he felt. That he was probably an invert and he was sorry about that, but that he knew Steve would understand, what it felt like to be half of a soul, like pieces of him were missing except when he was with Steve.

He wishes, too, that he could think of a way to say that that wouldn’t make him feel like he was some kind of sappy, soppy mess. He wrote it down, in letters and diaries and bundles of spare papers that he would throw away before anyone could comment on them. The fields of Europe are lined in poppies and the confessions of love of one James Buchanan Barnes.

He wishes, too, that he really could figure out this new world. It wasn’t that he couldn’t figure out the things people thought would confuse him the most. Cars, planes, all that was similar enough. Cell phones. The internet. He gets those. Fast cars, faster motorcycles, fancy planes. He likes all that. The food is better. The lights and the physical things, microwave ovens, all that, that’s all _understandable_ , it’s easy. 

What’s hard is the culture. It’s like he’s come to a totally different country, one that he only slightly recognizes as similar to his, but there’s no way home. He watches people and they’re just a little different - like looking in a mirror with a wave in it. Identical but just different. It’s not clothes and hair, except that some of it is, it’s something that he can’t quite put his finger on. When he sees teenage girls on the Metro in D.C. giggling over something, it’s almost like seeing girls in New York, seventy years ago, doing the same thing. Only it’s not. Only there’s something about them now, something more convinced, self-assured, less timid, more together. When he sees teenaged boys pushing each other, it’s the same thing. There’s something he can’t figure out. How are they so different from who he was seventy years ago, why is there something totally out of his world about them?

One of his therapists recommended that he volunteer somewhere, twice a week, to help him get his head back into the world. He started by volunteering at a retirement home, thinking that he would find something in common with the men and women who lived there because they had grown up in the twenties and thirties, too, but then he realized, quickly, that all they had in common was a slice of a world that doesn’t exist anymore, and that they were just as foreign to him as the people his own age. They had lived in this haze of idealism about the forties, like they had forgotten the terrible parts of the depression, the aching fear of not having money to eat or survive, like they had forgotten the awful terror of the war, of watching men go off to die and never come back. It didn’t help.

So after that he found out that the VA needed volunteers, and Bucky realized that he had more in common with the people his own age who had gone to war, even if occasionally Bucky still stands when a woman walks into the room, reaching up for a hat that he’s not wearing by pure instinct. 

But that’s not enough, either.

Bucky wishes, too, that he had a life outside of SHIELD, outside of the military. He wishes that he knew a sweet girl who he could take the movies, who he could make feel safe - or hell, at this point, maybe he would be secure enough to find someone, _anyone_ who he could spend more than one night with, in a way that wasn’t furtive and afraid. He wishes that he could build himself the kind of life that he and Steve would have both had, after the war, coming home. A wife and a couple of brats and Steve somewhere, probably with Peggy, but that would be okay, as long as they were close to each other. Maybe Bucky would never have gotten so much as a kiss on the top of the head from Steve, but he figures it would have been enough, right?

But what Bucky wishes most of all, on nights like this one where everything is strange and he knows that there are puzzle pieces missing, is that he could just figure out what the hell was actually going on. Clint was off on a mission somewhere, and he and Natasha were sitting on the roof of a building watching Jasper Sitwell go in and out of a nondescript set of government offices, because apparently Jasper Sitwell got that kind of surveillance now, even though he was probably the most benign analyst that existed in all of SHIELD history. “The man looks like he uses shoe polish to keep his head shiny,” Bucky comments, and Natasha offers him her open bag of Doritos.

(Bucky thinks that the junk food of the 21st century is pretty good, though)

“You shouldn’t mock him, he probably hasn’t been laid in about ten years,” Natasha says, and Bucky considers that, and finally gives a tilt of his head, like a concession. To be fair, Bucky’s been seven months without, but then he wasn’t particularly used to it since the war, and before the war, well - he may have stepped out with his fair share of girls, but he usually brought them home in the same condition that he found them in, with maybe a kiss on the mouth as a good night victory. Natasha crosses her legs, and keeps her eye out. “I wish he would make up his mind if he were coming or going, though.”

Bucky won’t lie, he wishes that too. “I don’t understand. What are we even doing here? Who cares about Jasper Sitwell this much?” he asks, eating another Dorito. 

Natasha does that thing, where maybe she’s being quiet because she’s bored and doesn’t want to reply, or maybe because she knows something that Bucky doesn’t and isn’t sure if she should spill. If there is anything that frustrates Bucky about this agent of a government intelligence agency thing, it’s the constant parade of secrets. But during the war they kept loads of things from him, and so he’s used to it. He thinks it would have driven Steve up the wall.

“Hey,” he says, sharply, and Natasha looks over. “Is that Rumlow?”

Natasha follows Bucky’s line of sight, and there, meeting Sitwell just as the sun is setting, is Rumlow. Natasha shrugs, and Bucky watches as they talk. He can’t read lips and even if he could, he’s not sure he cares. It’s two people meeting, it’s all well and good, and then-

-and then they _hug_.

No, they just hug, like that, on the street, and it’s-

-it’s weird.

Natasha turns to look at Bucky, he can see her in his peripheral vision, even though he’s leaning forward now as if a very slightly different angle will afford him insight into this hug that’s getting a little awkwardly long. “Are you sure he’s not getting laid?” Bucky asks, casually, although a part of him is trying not to hyperventilate. This is the culture clash in his head again, the part of him that is intensely afraid for them, even though Rumlow is no slouch and could pretty much decimate anyone who messed with him. Still, it doesn’t make Bucky feel comfortable with it, even though he knows it isn’t something that rational people consider taboo anymore.

Natasha watches impassively, as if she’s disconnecting from the events at hand. Finally she just leans and offers Bucky another Dorito. “Don’t know,” she says, as if she doesn’t care.

But Bucky cares.


	3. Chapter 3

The worst time, some people imagine, during the fall of an empire (whether that empire is created by birthright or by force) is during the messy battles, the war on life, even when that life is misery. The horrors of watching people die for no reason than they stood on the wrong side of a political divide.

Henrique thinks that this is probably not true.

The worst time is, in his opinion, is in the settling of ideology. Che Guevarra had a great message, but in all honesty, it would not have every worked. Such is the nature of any government where one charismatic man reigns over any other. Ideology is a dangerous virus, the kind of thing that can infect a population and refuse to let go. It doesn’t matter what clothes you dress it up in – religion or philosophy, it infects into the souls of people. The worst thing is to allow the ideology to exist at all.

No, the worst thing is to allow ideology to rest in the hands of a zealot. Everyone knows this. Stalin knew it: and so Trotsky had to go. Such is the way of falling governments everywhere. Training the people to see the ideology the way the new leader wishes is always a task left to those who lurk in the dark.

He’s sweating through his military uniform. It is infernally hot, and the rains have not let up for three weeks. He can smell the reek of it, the ancient musky smell of sweat and skin and fear have built up around him. Henrique is not a man who hates his job. He is a man who does it, well, and without fail, when they tell him to, and he does it well. But it has been a long coup.

The plane descends, sputtering, onto the ancient runway, the one that has almost been eaten by the jungle. It was built in the sixties, but here the jungle swallows everything that is not meticulously maintained, eats it in hungry, greedy bites. This was chosen because it had been forgotten, because after thirty years of democracy and a new airport, shinier and in a better location with flatter land, there was no need for this decaying death trap.

Henrique sweats more.

It takes a few minutes for one of the doors to open, for the staircase to descend, and a moment later a man comes down. He is dressed in a suit and immediately looks uncomfortable, pressing his hand to smooth his hair down. It has not been an easy trip, Henrique knows. From Washington to London and then down to Morocco, and two or three more flights to this forgotten, misbegotten hellish nightmare. Even the Portuguese are pleased to be rid of this place.

The man – Henrique knows his name, it is _Pierce_ , and he is here, officially, for a meeting to establish peace, in some form or another, to adjudicate in the construction of “democracy,” or to participate in the farce of it, anyway, is here unofficially for another reason. In the belly of that ship is the gun that Henrique will use to rid the General of poorly constructed ideology.

“I hope you’re Henrique Costa, or I’m a little too lost for my own comfort,” Pierce says, with a manner that is, he is sure, meant to be reminiscent of a grandfather. Henrique thinks privately to himself that is only reminiscent of the whites, self-smug and self-assured that in matters of state, no black man is getting the better of him. Henrique straddles that line, mixed in an uncomfortable way, in a way that makes it hard for people to look at him for very long. In that regard, it makes him even more grateful for this job.

“I am, welcome,” he says, taking his hat off, offering his hand to shake. Pierce shakes it. Diplomacy in action. “Did your trip go well?”

“Let’s leave the pleasantries for the capitol, hm?” Pierce replies. “It’s hotter than balls out here,” he says, reaching into his suit pocket and taking out a handkerchief.

Henrique wants to point out that he is not actually needed at the drop off, that this is something that could have been handled by a lesser man, but he knows, too, that this is the first time in many years that the weapon has been allowed out of Pierce’s care, and maybe, like a father, he wants to see it go into someone else, even if it is only for a few months.

There are other men here, to facilitate this exchange, including one who will remain the entire time, to ensure proper care. “We have a convoy,” Henrique points out, the battered vans sitting just a few meters away. “It is air-conditioned-“

Pierce waves his hand. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “the asset’s comfort isn’t really a concern. Just tell the General that if I don’t get it back, I’ll bomb this place off the map. Stark’s kid makes more weapons in a day than your entire army had in a year, and I don’t need think you’re ignorant that I have my own team in that camp, too.” He sounds so casual, like he is ordering coffee.

Henrique is not afraid of this. He gets threatened seven, eight times a day. Being at the General’s hand – left or right, it doesn’t matter – is no secure position. If anything, it’s expected. “Yes, of course,” he replies, and that’s when he sees the weapon for the first time.

The weapon makes his way down the stairs, dressed like no man should be dressed in this weather. Henrique knows his comfort is no issue – he can see that there is no sign of distress, anyway, and when he passes Henrique, when their eyes meet for just a second, that’s when the fear finally does strike him. There is a shiver up his back he cannot suppress.

He remembers, once, a woman. She was harboring dissenters in her home, feeding them, clothing them. He remembers his men going in and showing her a woman’s place, and he watched, for a while. There was a look in her eyes, something that was the closest approximation to unfiltered hate that Henrique had ever seen. He let this go on for hours. He let the men ravage her children, and kill them in front of her. At the end he shot her in the head, unwilling to touch her.

It was the worst thing that he had ever done, and looking into the eyes of the weapon, for a moment, it felt like a paltry thing, a child playing at being a grown man. The way his eyes looked, it spoke of atrocities that Henrique does not dream of.

He will do well, in cleaning out ideology.

~~~~~

What Bucky really wishes is that he could say that it didn’t totally unravel in a fell swoop, that his whole life - as depressingly vacant of actual bonds of anything he would consider friendship, even considering Natasha and Clint - didn’t just shatter in pieces like someone threw a rock through the window of it, only the rock was a grenade.

But Bucky also wishes that the Dodgers never left Brooklyn and that he could still pick up a loaf of bread for a nickel, so he knows it’s a matter of perspective.

(He also wishes that he could just pick a new team. The Yankees make him sick, and the Giants are not even remotely qualified. He likes the Nationals, and the Phillies, but if he thinks too long about the Braves, he wants to die a little on the inside.

But again.

Perspective.)

But still.

A few days after spotting Sitwell and Rumlow exchanging long embraces in public, for reasons that Bucky can’t really fathom (and that frankly, don’t matter), a bomb goes off at the Pentagon. When Rumlow tells him, Bucky looks at him for a long minute. “Well, it wasn’t the CIA,” Rumlow says with a really dry grin on his face, “because it actually went off,” he finishes.

Bucky is almost entirely suited up, shaking his head at Rumlow’s stupid CIA joke, especially considering how tasteless it is in light of current events. But there’s no dampening the inter-agency tendencies, and well, at least they’re not talking about the NSA. Bucky fastens his gloves and rolls his shoulders, getting his armor situated. “You’re support team, Barnes,” Hill says over the conference call, “so stay out of the way - and we mean it, this time.”

He doesn’t say anything back, and when they’re on the field, it’s a mess of a scene. Natasha gets there a few minutes after Bucky does, looking grim about the entire thing, but Bucky is up on support half a mile off. “Good to see you decided to show up, princess,” Bucky says as Natasha moves through the rubble. Even half a mile off, he can see her mouth purse in that familiar expression, that almost-smile, at his words. “I mean some of us work and some of us do our hair.”

She lets him tease because once he found out that she carries a mini battery-powered straightening iron in her utility belt, and then he watched her use it to inflict a severe third degree burn to a man’s chest during a fight, and from then on it became a running gag. “I’ve seen you get ready in the morning, Barnes, you spend more time in front of the mirror than any girl.”

“Well some of us aren’t naturally pretty,” he retorts, keeping his eye on her for another second, before wandering up, and across-

And there’s Rumlow.

He keeps an eye on Rumlow for another second, and he’s about to let his vision wander, when he sees Rumlow turn, look up, and Bucky catches the movement of someone else.

It’s so fast that Bucky is suddenly reminded of Normandy. But this time something’s different, because the man in armor, built enough like a weapon that even if he wasn’t loaded to the gills with weaponry, Bucky would be afraid of him in a toe-to-toe fight, and considering Bucky’s standard for people to be afraid of only consists of master assassins and possibly a Norse god (his meeting with Thor being fleeting and brief in the grand scheme of things, and with Loki, well, they only met in the sense that he’s on Bucky’s shitlist for what he did to Clint), and a couple of men who died in the forties, well.

It’s saying a lot.

Whatever happened, though, Bucky can see that Rumlow is scrambling for higher ground as the man from Normandy goes for killing blows. He’s not wasting any time, he’s not wasting any energy, and whatever he’s doing, he’s not wasting a single potential strike. It’s mesmerising, how _good_ it is, how elegant and smooth and how utterly balletic the movement is, and for a second it almost makes Bucky forget that _shit_ , this man is actively _trying to kill Rumlow_.

He takes the first shot, strictly non-lethal, aimed right for the space where, when the bullet hits, is where Bucky thinks (knows) the man’s shoulder will be. And there it is, the bullet hitting the meaty part of the shoulder, where body armor doesn’t do much in the grand scheme of things; there’s too much need for fluid motion to make armor that’s especially effective at the joints. 

It doesn’t slow him down very much, and Bucky takes a breath, just one, before he pulls the trigger again.

This time it hits the man’s mask, and that _doesn’t_ go through. The bullet’s kinetic energy, though, it keeps going, slamming into the mask and ripping it off, and the man looks right at Bucky (or so it seems, his sightline is really where the man knows Bucky should be, considering the trajectory) right in the middle of that sniper’s breath, that pause between shots to re-evaluate the scene, and Bucky’s hands immediately move away from the trigger, from the gun, by some long-dormant physical memory of-

-of-

-the truth is that Bucky never thought that his heart exploding would feel so utterly benign, when he thinks about it in the moment it’s happening. That can be the only explanation for the sudden burst of incredible searing heat in his heart, the rush of blood from his fingers and the space around his prosthetic and his neck straight into the core of his chest, pumping furiously to try and accommodate the influx of blood, the pressure of it beating at him, the adrenaline of it. He thinks that death is really being very compassionate. 

“ _Barnes, don’t shoot_ ,” he hears, tinny and crackling, Rumlow’s voice, and breaks him out of this hazy world of his body’s cursed betrayal. There’s a breathlessness there that Bucky logs for later, but the fact is that there is nothing - nothing - that would make him take aim and shoot again. The world could be burning to the ground around him, and the only way to save it would be to shoot, and Bucky would set the rifle down and walk away.

“Barnes,” he hears at his ear, and it’s Natasha this time, “did you have to engage?”

There’s silence because Bucky knows if he speaks his voice will betray everything. There are things in this world that he thought he would never see again, and up on that list, topping it even over his ma’s apartment and the babka their upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Schwartz, would make for them every spring, was Steve Rogers.

The only way that this could be more shocking was if Steve were ninety pounds again. 

As it is, Bucky is shaking, trying to get a sightline on his scope, but he can’t see anything. Steve is gone, and the only person there is Rumlow, cracking his neck and making a face like this was all a terrible mistake, a horrible mix-up, and like maybe he’s going to get shitfaced after this day is over. “Barnes!” he hears, again, Natasha again. “James!”

Bucky reaches for his comm and even he can hear the growl, the warning. “I’m not taking another shot, will you all lay off me?”

“We would if you replied to your comm,” Natasha snaps back, as if she’s never gone radio silent before, usually at the exact moment that it’s a bad idea to do so. “Rumlow?”

“There was a hostile, he fled, Barnes clipped him in the shoulder. Denisof is in pursuit,” Rumlow replies, and Bucky is too shaken up, too confused, too busy trying to relearn breathing, the sweet slow intake of oxygen and the rush of an exhale to even begin the mental questioning of how Rumlow could send Denisof after this guy, when Denisof is basically only good for remote handling and Steve looked like he could take down an army without a second thought.

Bucky wonders if this is what going crazy feels like, if this is some kind of shell-shock madness setting in years after the fact. His hands move, and he takes his rifle apart, strapping it in, and gets up. He can hear Natasha, tinny in his ear, and Rumlow too, but his brain is somewhere else, halfway back to 1945, except that time has never been so forgiving.

~~~~~

People think that Rumlow is an asshole, and he’s generally willing to admit that yeah, he kind of is. He’s never hit at or yelled at a woman he was in a relationship with, but his ex-girlfriends will generally cross the street if they see him coming, whispering epithets under their breaths, and most of his friends are also assholes, otherwise they would never put up with each other. 

Work is an exception. People can say that Rumlow is a grade-a piece of shit, but no one can ever say he doesn’t have a level of professional integrity, or professional pride. And he expects that same level - that same fucking commitment - to professionalism, even if his loyalties are suspect.

So when he told Denisof to _not punch the asset_ he meant _do not fucking punch the asset, you stupid piece of shit_.

As far as Rumlow could tell, everything had gone off without a hitch, until he got to the scene (faster than the firefighters). As he and the Widow were picking through the debris, he saw Denisof, his eyes wide, his face pale, skidding a corner around pieces of broken mess and concrete. “Run-,” he starts, and then he ducks, and there comes the asset like a charging bull, right over Denisof. Whatever happened, the asset is out of control, completely unhinged, and it kicks Denisof right in the stomach with a wicked hook that sends the smaller man flying.

The asset is about to go after him again, presumably to deal the killing blow, when Rumlow reaches out his hand. “Hey-” he yells, because again. 

He’s an asshole, but he’s a professional, and he’s not about to let the asset kill his handler. Denisof isn’t actually an idiot, no matter how much Rumlow wants to think he is. “Hey, calm down,” he says, and he only realizes his mistake - treating the Winter Soldier like a person - after the asset turns on him, that superhuman speed and strength suddenly slamming against him.

Rumlow knows that any misstep - any moment of hesitation - and he’s dead. The asset - the fist, the Soldier, whatever they’re calling him - isn’t ever set to _stun_. And with its programming on the fritz, like it clearly is now, Rumlow is basically doing everything he can to just stay alive. Every single dodge comes only from luck, he thinks. 

It only lasts seconds before he hears the sound of a bullet entering skin, and another second before the sound is more of a bullet against metal, and the asset’s mask is off.

“Barnes, don’t shoot,” he begins, without thinking about it. He knows Barnes - he’s the best sniper that SHIELD has, arguably, with the fastest reaction time, and he can’t let him shoot the asset in the head. But then he thinks to himself that maybe that wasn’t a good idea-

But by that point, Denisof has come to enough to crawl from where he was groveling over his stomach, and in the moment of distraction - the shot taking the asset’s attention for just a moment - tases him in the leg, and barks something out in Russian.

The asset takes off. Rumlow looks down, and Denisof is getting up, hissing, “It was Denton, Denton hit him in the face, and he lost it.”

Rumlow knows, then, that Denton is a body somewhere, that Denisof isn’t to blame for this. He just nods, and he jerks his head. If anyone is going to handle the asset back into some semblance of order, it’s Denisof. Denisof takes off, too. “There was a hostile, he fled, Barnes clipped him in the shoulder. Denisof is in pursuit,” Rumlow says.

It isn’t until later, when they’re back at SHIELD, and Barnes slides over to Rumlow as he’s taking off his armor and taking careful catalog of his wounds and his bruises that he realizes how many stupid, rookie mistakes he made. Telling Barnes to stop shooting. Saying Denisof was in pursuit. He hopes for a second that Barnes - the grandson of James Buchanan Barnes, of _all_ people - didn’t catch the asset’s face for long enough to recognize him. “What happened back there?” Barnes asks, hands on his thighs, the metal one ungloved.

Rumlow shakes his head. “I saw him coming but not fast enough. Good shot,” he replies, casually. There are a few things that Rumlow is good at. Lying through his teeth is one of them.

Barnes just gives him a look, careful and quiet for a moment. Rumlow can tell - the kid isn’t buying it. In fact, he seems to be considering something; words, maybe, the exact string of them to figure out what the hell happened out there. Finally, he asks, quiet, “What the hell is going on around here?”

Rumlow takes stock of the kid. He’s been eyeing him for months - Hydra could use a sniper like him, and Barton’s loyalties are solid as stone. But Barnes? He always seems a little distant, like he isn’t interested in anything that people are selling. Even his friendships, the occasional odd one like Barton or Romanoff, they look more like distractions than anything else. Rumlow isn’t stupid - he knows what it looks like, when a man doesn’t have any friends outside of work. Barnes is smart, sharp as steel, and doesn’t take Fury or Hill’s word as sacrosanct. He goes off-comm more than he doesn’t. There’s a streak in him, of pure irrational defiance, and Rumlow recognizes it. Sure, there’s the family legacy thing, but the only time Barnes ever talks about his grandfather is with a shrug of _never met the guy_ and _I heard he was sort of a failure_ , so maybe it wouldn’t be such a hard thing to overturn.

He takes a moment.

“Kid,” he finally says, maybe going out on a limb that’ll end up with him trying to kill Barnes in the night, “I’ll transfer you over to my unit.” That’s as close as he can get to _if you want to know, we have to work on your loyalties_.

Hell.

Pierce’ll think it’s a laugh riot.

~~~~~

Rumlow’s unit is as far from anywhere that Bucky should be, but here he is.

If asked (and he is, over and over again) he just says that Rumlow needed a sniper, asked him, and that was it. When Natasha asks, the smile on her face tripping towards _disappointed_ and _disapproving_ , he doesn’t say anything at first, but finally settles on, _look, I promise, there’s a good reason_.

Barton doesn’t ask because Barton is off on a mission somewhere, so deep undercover that even his own mother wouldn’t recognize him.

The thing is, the reason may be good, at the end of the day, but it doesn’t mean it makes any _sense_. Getting close to Rumlow because of a man who was a drop dead ringer for Steve, just because Rumlow ordered Bucky off shooting him? Not exactly a logical progression towards finding him. But Bucky learned stubbornness from Steve’s good example, and this one, this puzzle, it’s dogging him.

Rumlow’s unit, though.

The sniper is a funny position to have. Bucky regards it as largely outside of the team, at least where SHIELD is concerned. With the Commandos, he was Steve’s second-in-command, Steve’s right hand, plus, he knew the guys better than Steve simply because he served with them even before Steve was a glimmer in Erskine and Stark’s mad scientist eyes. But in SHIELD, it was a lonely post, being the eye in the sky.

And the eye kept watching Rumlow’s unit and being slightly nauseated by what he saw.

It was never outright disgusting. It was always just skirting the corners of wrong. Maybe it was a kick that looked too rough, or something that looked too ineffective, but while Bucky watched, it looked a little lingering on the violence. And there was something about the way their loyalty worked that was - strange. Strange was the only word for it. Bucky recognizes it as blind devotion, because that’s exactly how things were in the Commandos, only without the touchstone of Steve’s unwavering moral underpinnings.

After five missions and three months with them, Bucky is about ready to throw in the towel. He hasn’t seen hide nor hair of Steve, and he’s not even sure why he thought Rumlow would lead him there in the first place; something about sending Denisof after him, something about that fight, something, something. Bucky’s gut isn’t usually wrong, but he doesn’t have a perfect track record, either. 

If he quits, he thinks, he can focus his resources on finding Steve without dealing with the crap that is Rumlow and Rumlow’s orders, the wetwork that seems a little shady. There’s nothing really above board about being an assassin, and Bucky knows that better than anyone - they kept him because he was good at what he did, sure, but more importantly they kept him because he always understood the need for dirty things to be done even despite the good intentions of those doing them. 

But before he quits, like it was timed or planned, they’re on a strike mission in New York, of all places. Bucky does his bit; which is admittedly just keeping an eye out on the ground mission to retrieve a package, when Rumlow’s voice comes on in his ear, crankily muttering, “Barnes, you feel like paying your ma a visit?”

Bucky does not retort that his ma has been dead a good sixty years, thanks, because his cover says that his mother is alive and well and living in some tiny apartment in the Bronx.

(When Fury dropped that on him, Bucky had been offended. “The Bronx? You would put my mother in _the Bronx_? What the hell’s the matter with you?” but apparently Brooklyn was too rich for his background, at least the parts of Brooklyn that mattered, and anyway, it was too convenient, they needed some distance. Bucky tried pointing out that he knew families that had been in Brooklyn for generations, usually all those generations in the same two bedroom tenements, but Fury wasn’t budging. All he was willing to give was on letting Bucky have grown up in Brooklyn up until age sixteen, because there was no beating that Brooklyn twang out of his voice when he got upset enough.)

“Are you telling me to scram?” he says, the smile in his voice even as he keeps his post. 

Rumlow laughs a bit; it’s a sound Bucky’s getting more and more used to, despite his best intentions to not listen to whatever comes before or after. “I think it’s just cleanup, here on in. If you want a break, I say you take it now, before we’re heading back to D.C.”

Bucky considers that. He could stop by the old apartment - SHIELD puts them up in the headquarters in Manhattan, but Bucky doesn’t like to stay there, holed up in Manhattan - it hurts his pride. Usually he stays in Brooklyn, in hotels that are converted old tenements, blocks away from his old life. It wouldn’t be so bad to go down there, to sit in McCarren Park and watch people go about their lives. “Yeah, all right,” he says, and he’s getting ready - getting up first, taking a long stretch, letting himself get used to moving again. It’s a habit, to take a few minutes to get up and out of his nest, when he has that luxury to spare.

He looks down, then, and-

-his heart speeds up again like the first time, and he’s on his stomach, eye pressed against the scope. There he is, only this time he’s talking to Rumlow - no, that’s not right. It’s Steve, in that black muzzle, and Rumlow is talking to him, and Denisof is there, and no, Bucky doesn’t care.

His priorities are all a mess, but he takes his rifle apart, straps it into its locked box and stuffs it into his messenger bag, and moves - fast - to find a spot to follow. Whatever is happening, whatever Rumlow is doing, and whatever reason Rumlow has _Steve_ , that’s not important. None of it is. The only thing that matters, the only thing that Bucky gives even a single shit about is that he is not even five hundred yards from his best friend, in some capacity or another, and that if he doesn’t move fast he’ll lose him again.

He gets there just in time to hear Rumlow mutter something under his breath. It’s only Bucky’s enhanced hearing (thanks _again_ , Zola) that lets him make out that someone is talking, and he’s only ten feet away; Bucky is squeezed into a tiny space between buildings, and if he twists his head just right he can see the three men in the quiet, empty lot. They look like they’re three men having a conversation, and in the dark it would be impossible to see the muzzle on Steve’s face if someone were to walk by.

(Even then, Bucky thinks, this is Manhattan, no one would look twice.)

Steve is squatting at Denisof’s feet, like he’s a dog on the trail, and Bucky knows that when he twists his head like that, one ear pitching high to the side, that Steve hears him.

He lowers his breathing, he goes utterly still. Natasha taught him how to do this - he always knew how to move quiet, he had to, during the war, but it’s better now, even if it isn’t perfect. He presses his back against the wall and holds still. 

The van that pulls up a moment later is clearly for Steve - huge and black and armored, and Bucky feels a shiver when he sees it. He’s traveled in vans like this one, with Natasha, transport that was designed to keep them from public view. But he and Natasha, they travel in the front, where the windows are.

He gets the feeling that Steve will travel in the back.

Denisof says something in Russian, and Bucky catches parts of it; his Russian is good, especially since Natasha is helping him improve, but all he hears are basic commands, as if Steve is a dog. And the more Bucky thinks about this, watching him load up into the van, the more that this bothers him; Steve never let anyone talk to him like that back in 1940, why the hell is he letting it happen here? What the hell is going on here?

The van begins to drive, and Bucky takes a breath, and runs after them. 

Bucky blesses Manhattan for very few things. There’s a good macaroni and cheese restaurant in the Village that he likes, and there’s never anything wrong with taking a girl for a walk in Central Park. But right now his blessing goes to the fact that Manhattan is not conducive for any kind of quick getaway. Bucky can keep up with the van, even if occasionally he has to hop on the hood of a few cars, and considering he doesn’t hear Rumlow barking in his ear to stop, he thinks that he’s probably getting away with it.

In fact, Bucky may be too busy shadowing the van to think about it clearly at this exact moment, but he’s filing away the fact that in some way or another, Rumlow was involved in this in the back of his head. 

He keeps running, he keeps up, and when the van drives down into the garage of a building Bucky stares up at the wall, slowing down and stopping before he gets in sight of the cameras. He can spot three just on the offset, which means that there are probably at least three more; this is no time to be incautious. This isn’t a SHIELD building, or at least, this isn’t a SHIELD building he knows about. He takes a look at it, slips into the building next door. It is two in the morning, and dark, but there is a diner open on every third block in New York City, and this one has the most exhausted looking waitress Bucky has ever seen.

He’s still in his blacks, but with his messenger bag stuffed full of his gun and his leather jacket, he just looks like half the clientele, so he takes a seat in a booth and orders a coffee, pondering his next move. The coffee tastes like sludge and sewer water had a child, and it reminds him so strongly of the coffee he used to get in the barracks that he acquiesces to having the waitress pour him a refill after only a few minutes. 

The waitress is about to leave when he stops her. “Excuse me,” he says, softly, smiling a bit. “Can you tell me what’s next door?”

She looks at him for a really long minute, like her addled brain is trying to put together why the hell he’s speaking to her, and why he really wants to know. Finally she looks out onto the street. “It’s a dry cleaners.”

Bucky stares at her. 

She stares back. And then she leaves him alone, with his coffee, because clearly she is too overworked for this. He takes a sip of his sludge and makes a decision - probably a terrible one - and stands, leaving the woman a tip that is more than the cost of the coffee. He figures she probably has to serve overworked and exhausted secret agents more often than she should have to.

And he heads out, takes a good look at the building, and breaks in.

~~~~~~

Getting to interview a Howling Commando ranks pretty high up on the list of things that Georgia never thought she would do, back when she was in college double-majoring in history and journalism. To begin with, they were all pretty old, or dead – Dugan of a heart attack in ’82, and Dernier either dead or missing after going to Vietnam to help try and de-mine some farmland. But here she is, on assignment – she’s at least managed to not say anything too impolite or inappropriate and it’s a goddamned miracle, because when she and her sister were little girls they used to pretend they were married to the Howling Commandos – all of them at once – and that they would go on stupidly wild adventures to save people with them.

Dernier is a bit of a sensitive subject in this meeting. Jim Morita does not look pleased that she’s brought it up, but he takes a drink of his whiskey (it is ten in the morning, and the smell makes her queasy, but she isn’t saying anything) and mutters, “French bastard probably holed himself up in a Vietnamese village, got married, and forgot the rest of the world existed,” he says, and Georgia doesn’t write that down. She recognizes it for what it is: the hopes of a man who is too used to his old war friends disappearing on him.

This interview has been going on an hour and half of what he’s said is exactly that – loneliness and maybe a little irritation, all boiled down into one distilled swig of bitterness. She’s tried to focus on him, on his work, particularly on his latest accomplishment: a serum that, in trial stages in mice, has replicated some of the effects that the famous Erskine Serum achieved with Steve Rogers. “It’s ridiculous to credit me with it,” he says, “that’s like crediting Stark for inventing electricity. All I did was let a bunch of graduate students loose on old samples of Steve Rogers blood. If you want to credit anything, credit the researchers at the SSR – sorry, _SHIELD_ , who threw that crap my way forty years ago.”

Georgia is already constructing sentences in her head: _he refers to the accidental donation of supplies to his lab at Berkeley, where he worked after the war, despite his only scientific credentials being working as a field medic during his time with the Howling Commandos_ , and she wonders if that’s reductive. She’ll clean it up in print.

“Well, I only have a couple more questions, and they’re mostly about Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes. Are you all right talking about them?”

Morita perks up then, even though there’s an element of utter sadness. “Sure, kid,” he says, softly, for the first time this entire interview. But he doesn’t wait for her question. “Rogers was the best CO I ever had, don’t doubt it, and Barnes, he was probably the only guy who could match Cap, second by second. The history books all say that, but there’s things they don’t say, you know.”

Georgia leans in, then, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t want to interrupt this line of thought. “It was a long time ago, but I can’t forget just how much they belonged to each other. You ever meet people like that? People who have spent so long living in and out of the other’s pockets that when they’re on their own, they look like half a person. Barnes used to look at Rogers like he hung the moon and the stars, and Cap, well. He only operated at quarter capacity without Barnes around. Not that anyone would notice, not even him, but the guys and I, we always used to hate it when Barnes went on solo missions, he and Dernier, and Jones, too, they all did a lot of solo work, especially in ’44, because Cap would suddenly have half his brain focused on where the fuck – pardon, I’m sorry,” he says, even though he’s been swearing this whole interview.

He shakes his head for a minute, as if to clear it. “They had every inside joke under the sun. Barnes was really rough, shaken up after Cap saved him, but then, like magic, he started smiling again. I always liked Barnes a lot, before I met Cap, but after, it was night and day. It was impossible not to like him if Steve was around, even though sometimes people still didn’t like Cap, they always liked Bucky.”

Georgia feels a prickle, a journalistic question rising to the surface, and it comes out. The second it leaves her mouth, she regrets it.

“Were they lovers?”

Morita’s face closes, then, and he pushes his chair back. “Why the hell would you ask that?” he asks back, but it isn’t angry, it isn’t a moment of stark homophobia in action. Georgia can see the difference, the emotions on his face are more complicated than that. “Do you think that’s the business of the American public?”

She takes that, then, for a _yes_ , but Morita reaches over, turns the recording off. “Listen here, little girl,” he says, sharply, “those two men loved each other, they would have done anything for each other. When Barnes died, Cap lost it, he went right over the deep end of grief. There wasn’t anything left for him; even Carter couldn’t have stopped him. But every single second that they could have had together, they didn’t, because both of them were brave on one side and cowards on the other. We all were. It was 1945, and it was war, and we all wanted to think that one day Barnes would get the guts up to tell C- _Steve_ exactly what he felt for him. But if you print that? Then you’re just doing it to help people gawk, and I promise I’ll make your life hell for it.”

Georgia sits there, silent as a stone, feeling like she did when a teacher would lecture her right before a punishment like detention. “Yes sir,” she finally manages, and Morita sits back, satisfied.

“Is that it? Is this thing over?” He takes a drink. “I’ll tell you this, too. That serum? Probably won’t work. They never do. It’s not the science. You just can’t replicate Steve Rogers.”

She leaves, and the wind is just on the edge of chilly – the nipping wind of winter chasing away a warm fall – and she bumps into someone on the street. The man rights her, quickly, and goes into Morita’s apartment building before she can say thank you, taking advantage of the open door from when she left.

The next day, while she’s still brewing her coffee, she gets on her StarkPad and almost drops it in surprise. Jim Morita’s death is headline news.

~~~~~

Of course they catch him.

Bucky didn’t have a plan. He didn’t have an escape route. He thought, if he could get to Steve, if they were both on the same side, then _maybe_ \- but Bucky doesn’t even know what this place is, and this was all tremendously stupid, a stunt pulled in the throes of emotional need, in fear that if he didn’t do it now, he would never get another chance. In the hopes that somewhere inside of himself was a piece of the man who did the same for him.

_Not without you_.

He doesn’t go down without a fight. The first wave of soldiers, they’re hesitant to shoot him, and he’s not sure why, but he takes advantage of it. Finally one of them has enough of him beating on them and moving on, and he shoots, only to hit Bucky’s metal arm as he raises it in defense - seriously, maybe this arm wasn’t a terrible idea - and he punches the guy in the face, his nose crumpling inward. 

The second wave, though.

They’re better armed, and they’re much better trained. Even so, Bucky gets through a number of them before one of them hits him with something that reminds him a little of one of Natasha’s bites; his arm gets the full force of an EMP blast coupled with an electric shock. Stark built the arm out of the same thing his suit is made of, and it can shrug that sort of thing off, but even his arm needs a second, and in a fight like this one, that second is critical. He uses it like deadweight, twisting his body to take someone out, but he doesn’t see the device that the man - who does this in what is a suicide move, sliding into Bucky’s arm’s range of motion, taking the full brunt of the metal - puts on his stomach, and activates, just as Bucky’s arm makes a sickening crunch against the side of the man’s head.

He wasn’t expecting martyrdom, and maybe that’s part of the problem.

The device shocks him, and even Bucky’s system, enhanced as it is, can’t take the punch of electricity straight to the stomach. He distantly hears someone yell and he hopes to god it isn’t him, but he suspects it probably is.

He wakes up in a cell; the kind of cell that’s specifically designed to hold someone like him. The entire thing is bare; Bucky wakes up on the floor. The walls are smooth, and steel, the door perfectly flush with barely a ripple for the seam.

He waits there for a long time; the entire time he’s trying to figure out a way out. There’s no tracking device on his arm, and now he sort of regrets scowling at Fury when he suggested it and making Tony take it out, and they took his phone, which is no great surprise. They even took his beacon, an SOS alarm that would have sent a signal to Natasha’s phone, so he doesn’t have any hope for backup. 

He paces, then.

It doesn’t do anything but carve an imaginary path in the floor, so he puts his arm against the wall, the metal one, and starts trying to find weak points, punching. It does nothing but slightly dent the walls, which is troubling, because once he punched through a car door. He’s starting to get serious flashbacks to 1943, and a cold slab, and experiments, and of course that’s when they must be limiting the oxygen because Bucky is sucking air in but it’s doing nothing.

He’s about to let this build into a full-fledged panic attack when he hears someone yell, from outside the room, “Put your hands on the wall, legs spread, and don’t move!”

His head snaps up and he looks at the door, and contemplates his options. He knows if he does this, someone will come in - although, considering, it’ll probably be several someones, all armed to the teeth. But what choice does he have? Stay here and starve and refuse? That’s stupid. If he’s out, there’s a slim chance that somehow, they’ll let him get to Steve.

So he does as he’s told, and he looks down at the ground between his feet, grinding his teeth until it feels like they’re dust. A moment later the door opens and he listens as at least six men enter, and he can hear the _click, click, click_ of their boots against the floor, and the sound of their guns cocking, as if that means anything, except as a note to let him know they’re armed.

“Barnes.”

Bucky grits his teeth more. He liked Rumlow, in a distant, coworker way, but now he just wants to slam the man’s head into the wall, over and over. It’s not personal, really, except that he feels like Steve is a part of him, so maybe actually it is. “You really screwed the pooch, didn’t you?” Rumlow asks, rhetorically, as he moves closer.

“My curiosity is my downfall,” Bucky manages, finally, because it seems like a better idea than insulting his manhood, his conscience, and probably his dog. “What can I say.”

Rumlow makes a noise that’s like a laugh, but not quite. “I like you, Barnes. You’re sharp, you’re good, and you don’t run your mouth when you’re on the job,” he says, and it burns a little, because he knows it’s one of the reasons that he sometimes gets annoyed with Natasha. “So I gotta ask, what the hell are you doing here? Because I don’t like what I’m going to have to do to you.”

“You could just not do it,” Bucky suggests, looking at Rumlow from under his own arm. He doesn’t move because he knows that the people with the guns aren’t going to hesitate to shoot if he makes a move, and he can’t help Steve if he’s dead. There is a mouthy part of his head that is really unhappy, and it keeps snarling at him for the stupidity of this, and points out that Natasha probably could get out of this.

He does not really have any strong affections towards that mouthy part of him.

But Rumlow doesn’t reply to that, he just pushes Bucky’s shoulder, signaling for him to stand, and nods towards the door. “March, soldier.”

Bucky does as he’s told and highly resists asking how they plan on killing him, because frankly, at this point? Not knowing is the infinitely better option. The alternative is having it detailed out, or worse, finding out that what they plan to do isn’t to kill him, but to strap him to a table and run some experiments on him. Bucky might actually kamikaze if he hears that.

They lead him down hallways, and more hallways, and down and down flights of stairs, until the only place they could logically be is either the bowels of the building or very close to the surface of China. The room is a dank pit, though, so Bucky is going with the bowels of the building; it’s a bare room, and large enough to accommodate a space on the floor that must be at least twenty feet in both directions, and space for people to stand around it. The people, in fact, who are standing around it, filing in from the other entrance.

The team of highly armed soldiers lead Bucky to the center of the square, and keep pointing the guns in his direction. Rumlow nods up. “Here’s the deal,” he begins, as if this completely and utterly rational, as if none of this is something that a crazy person might do. As if they’re actually still on planet earth. “I’ll vouch for you.”

Bucky resists the 1940s urge to thank him in a long-drawn, sarcastic Brooklyn-tinged moment of bad manners. He looks around a bit, taking stock. There’s no way he could get out of this room, back up the stairs, and to the street, not realistically. But Bucky’s not aiming for realistic, here. Rumlow is still talking, talking to him, and he’s only listening with half an ear, until Rumlow barks, “Soldier! Do you understand me?”

Years of being in the army and the finest 1920s rote memorization education serves him well, because Bucky is parroting out, “I fight this soldier, all I gotta do is cut him, and then you’ll initiate me, is that right?”

Rumlow’s stance doesn’t change, but something about him relaxes a bit. “That’s all,” he says, and Bucky thinks this is stupidly easy for something that’s supposed to be an initiation into whatever little club this is. No wonder he took out a bunch of their guards up at the door.

Rumlow reaches into his boot and pulls a knife - decently sized but not too big, SHIELD issue, and tips it handle first into Bucky’s flesh and blood hand. “Good luck,” he says, and then Bucky turns to see who the unlucky punk it is who he just has to _draw blood_ on, and, well.

Bucky has never had bad luck before 1942 and the draft letter came in the same day a massive snowstorm took their neighborhood over and Steve’s asthma flared up, but since then, he can practically see the world ready to throw shit on him. 

It’s Steve.

Of course it’s Steve.


	4. Chapter 4

Maria has never seen the Winter Soldier, and even Romanoff isn’t sure he exists, even though there was that engineer who she was supposed to extract, who she found dead in Odessa a mile and a half from the meeting point, his neck broken. It’s not exactly something that takes up a huge portion of their time, frankly; they have bigger things to worry about.

Right now Maria is much more concerned with why her coffee is taking so long to brew. It’s just sitting in her french press, bubbling away, slowly turning black, but this is taking too long and she is exhausted. It is three thirty in the morning and she really needs to be more awake if she’s going to take on the day with only an hour and a half of sleep.

This is the side of Maria that she refuses to let anyone see; the side that sits in her kitchen, dead-eyed at three in the morning, wishing that the fundamental laws of nature would just speed the fuck up. SHIELD recruits think that she’s a machine, but she is just as human as the rest of them, simply more unwilliing to let that side show. She’s wearing pajamas. Her hair is a mess. She is not thinking of the Winter Soldier.

That’s when she sees something on the floor of her kitchen - a piece of trash left over from last night’s take out extravaganza - and bends over to pick it up.

Which is when the bullet snaps through the glass of her apartment’s window, and lodges in the wall just where Maria’s head should have been. 

Training kicks in, then. Despite being exhausted, despite being unable to think clearly, despite being 30 hours off sleep and one and a half on, without any coffee, and still puzzling over the encrypted files and she and Romanoff have been squinting at for the past two days, despite _all of that_ , she still hits the ground, belly crawls to the cabinet where she keeps the pots and pans, and fishes one of her Glocks out from where she hides it in the pasta pan, more annoyed than anything else. 

She’s going to have to call in backup in her pajamas. 

This is absolutely a Barton move, and it infuriates her that she’s even considering it.

She stays down behind the island, trying to figure out what to do. If there’s a sniper, then she knows that getting up is a terrible idea, and that trying to take a shot is an even worse one. Barnes might be able to manage a move like that, in the dark, with a _handgun_ but Maria’s talents lie elsewhere. The chances are high, too, that the sniper is still there, knowing that she only has a little cover. 

Her phone is on the counter, next to the coffeepot and the flash drive, and she’s not wearing her earpiece because it’s _three-thirty in the goddamned morning_ , don’t assassins have any manners at all?

She reaches up for the phone, quickly, and gets the flashdrive just as the coffee explodes on her from the second shot. She actually swears at that, but not loudly, just a whispered _fuck_ , because she was really looking forward to that cup of coffee.

She waits a minute, then, before she goes again, reaching up and finally grabbing hold of the cell phone. She’s thankful for a moment that they recently updated their tech so that their signals couldn’t be jammed, in the off-chance that this assassination attempt was as thought out as she likes her own missions to be, and presses her last call number.

Natasha answers like she’s perfectly awake, on the beach somewhere in paradise, cool as a cucumber. “Romanoff.”

“I’m getting shot at,” Maria replies, surprised that she doesn’t sound more annoyed over the phone. Two can play at this game.

Romanoff doesn’t even get ruffled, but she does get more serious, which is at least somewhat reassuring. “Backup?” she asks, and Maria can tell she’s already making a list of people in her head. This is probably the only phone call Maria’s going to get before the sniper - or the sniper’s team - makes another move, so she can’t waste it.

And in the spirit of not wasting it, Maria replies, “You, Barnes, Barton, at least. But speed over substance. Don’t call Fury yet.”

Romanoff gives a quick noise of acknowledgement and then Maria hangs the phone up and curls against her kitchen island after she puts her phone and the flash drive in her pajama pockets (who knew that pajama pockets could actually serve a purpose?) - those are the only things in the apartment with any security risk whatsoever attached to them, as her computer’s files will automatically dump into the SHIELD secure server and then fry the hard drive if anyone tries to hack it. 

It’s quiet, and she knows that she has to keep alert, and ready to move at any second. Luckily the adrenaline and the dampness of the coffee help her stay alert as the minutes tick by.

Her door opens without so much as a creak, but the air around her warms a bit - Maria keeps her apartment cool by habit - and that gives her an idea of the kind of agent she’s dealing with. It’s someone who can move silently, who matched the light in the hall to the light in the apartment, who accounted for everything, but couldn’t possibly account for how Maria likes sleeping at exactly 62 degrees when she has any control over the matter.

She moves back, closer to the window. Now that whoever it is is here, she doesn’t feel so confined to one space, even though she knows that in close quarters this possibly got more dangerous than she’s prepared for. The fact that they move so silently doesn’t help her in figuring out just where in the room they are, and that means she can’t just move, aim, and fire. 

Suddenly he’s no longer silent. Suddenly he’s running, and Maria is running too, heading for the window, her training taking over in a flash of muscle memory and thought. She has a third floor apartment, but she also has a fire escape, and she’s not risking engagement in the apartment. Her next door neighbors have a six year old and she’s not going to shoot on the off-chance that Maribel might wake up and have a sudden terror of her bed. Finding a three bedroom apartment in Manhattan is hard enough without having to move so your kid will sleep.

She feels the sharp heat of pain where a knife hits her shoulder just as she hits the fire escape and topples over the railing, the momentum of her fleeing and the force of the knife making her fling forward and right into the alley.

She lands with a thump, her entire body ringing from shock, but not from broken bones and she doesn’t question why. Instead she pulls herself up out of the pile of whatever it was she landed in (mattress pads and pillows, bedding, from her neighbor down the hall who had bedbugs, her brain provides, and she has never been more grateful for _bedbugs_ ) and takes off into the street, Glock in hand, and runs right into a pair of SHIELD trainees - Kenyon and Garrison, the names come into her head unbidden - who are coming out of a black car.

Natasha brought her _trainees_.

“Get in-” she says, and they turn around and back into the car, and Natasha looks at her from the drivers seat. “Go, go, _go_!” she commands, and they’re zooming down the street a minute later.

That’s when the adrenaline seeps out of her, finally.

Kenyon was a field medic so he’s already examining the knife in her shoulder, and Garrison is just staring at her with wide eyes. He carefully reaches up and pulls a banana peel from where it’s resting on her head, that she probably picked up from the dumpster. Maria remembers she’s in her pajamas, wet, her hair a mess, and coffee dumped all over her, and it takes all her remaining energy to not bat his hand away, until he says, “Uh, Deputy Director HIll, are you all right?”

She leans forward, then, and hisses, “Really, trainees?”

“I didn’t know you would be in your jammies, Maria,” Natasha says with a smirk, which is of course when something enormous and heavy lands on the car, and by some miracle of skill, luck, and Natasha’s sheer ability to stay upright, she doesn’t swerve into oncoming traffic.

To Garrison and Kenyon’s credit, no one screams, but both of them pile on Maria in what can only be a human shield, and so she doesn’t see what happens next - how Natasha veers the car right onto outside lane of the Queensboro Bridge, the lane that usually Maria avoids because she doesn’t like the potential for disaster that accompanies being so far off the center of the bridge. She’s too busy yelling at the trainees to get off her when she hears the ping of a gun and someone - Kenyon, she thinks - gives out an aborted yell, and then there’s dead weight on her.

That’s when Natasha slams the side of the car into the barrier, and the displacement clearly makes the assassin fall into the water, because the noise above them ceases. “Kenyon-” Garrison says, and then he swears as he sits up.

Maria closes her eyes and knocks her head back into the seat. “Queens SHIELD facility?” she asks, but in her head, she’s already making a list of the people to notify of Michael Kenyon’s death.

~~~~~~

Three months after Bucky woke up, he went for a run. 

This was a momentous day. For if nothing else than for the fact that it was the first day that he decided to go on a run, ever, in the entire history of his natural life. Apparently, taking up running as a form of stress relief, some kind of therapy or something was a routine thing here in the current century, and not something that cruel and sadistic boot camp instructors made you do to suffer at dawn. However, it was also the first day that he was alone, really alone.

He ran, tirelessly, through Manhattan, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and into a place that he didn’t know anymore, and took a break near the river, sitting on a bench by the water for a good hour. He looked out into the future and saw an entire world that was something out of a comic book, the noise and the lights and the mass _innovation_ something that he couldn’t dream of. He turned, and said out loud, _this is like a pulp book, bud-_ and stopped when he realized that the person he was speaking to wasn’t there, and would never be there again.

But here he is, in this damp, cold, suffocating mouth of hell, standing in front of him, unarmed. After all that time in Europe, Bucky thought he had gotten used to how big Steve was, how utterly enormous he seemed, but after a couple of years he had forgotten just how broad his shoulders were, just how much larger he was. In a way, he’ll always be that little guy, to Bucky.

Which makes this all the harder.

The entire room is quiet as Rumlow backs off and the fight begins.

In Bucky’s world, there are two kinds of fights. One is loud and flashy, brash and full of posturing, the kind of fight that he used to fish Steve out of all the time. The kind of fight where it’s one guy wailing on another to prove a point. The kind of fight that sells tickets to boxing matches.

After being in war, after SHIELD, Bucky learned about the second kind of fight. The second kind of fight is fast, as fast as possible, and often won with speed and tiny movements, little openings where luck and skill merge into one. Those fights leave someone dying at the end of it. Those fights are the fights that Natasha is good at, the ones she trained him for.

So he’s not ashamed to take a moment, to take that first moment to decide: what kind of fight he needs this to be, to get them both out of this alive.

But before he can decide, Steve is moving in that impossibly fast way that only he’s really capable of, swinging a leg in a hook at the same time he’s twisting his body to go for the knife in Bucky’s hand. There is nothing that could prepare him for the shock of it, the thundering impact of Steve’s leg, and it’s training that keeps his hands from Steve’s grip.

He doesn’t have time to even take a pause, because then Steve is going again, to punch him, and Bucky realizes that he can’t just leave it. He can’t just sit there and passively wait for Steve to kill him. 

When he gets into the fight, it’s not a sudden turning of the tables. Steve still gets him with a wicked left hook right to the jaw, and Bucky thinks he can hear the crack of bone at the same time it’s ringing in his ear. He takes a page from Natasha’s book, then, and even while Steve’s speed is unreal, Bucky tries to keep up. He tries, and he tries, and he has an opening to slice his arm and-

_Buddy, you gotta stop being so dumb, you gotta stop picking these fights-_

-and he doesn’t take it. He’s rewarded with his head being slammed into the ground, and Bucky is faceup, watching Steve’s fist aiming for his eye. He rolls just as Steve’s fist slams into the ground where his head was a second ago.

The crack of the cement moving twists Bucky’s gut.

There is something, though, that they can’t possibly know, these men who surround him. Naturally, Bucky is better than most at predicting where _people will be_ as opposed to _where people are_ \- that’s a natural sniper tendency. But they don’t know, too, that Bucky’s the one who _trained_ Steve, originally, and despite his flashy new moves and his utterly unstoppable speed, there are things that Steve still does that are 100% pure Brooklyn. It’s muscle memory at its finest.

So Bucky lasts another second before he moves, and it takes all his strength, everything the metal arm has to give, and all his emotional fortitude to reach for Steve’s wrist in the place it’ll be in a second and grab it, pull him, and slice the other man’s arm.

_Don’t worry, punk, just get down there, and I’ll watch your back._

The fight ends in the blink of an eye, just like that, with Steve getting up, cracking his neck, and Bucky dropping the knife. Later, someone will tell Bucky that it lasted eleven seconds, which is nine seconds longer than usual, because usually, the asset kills that fast.

But right now, Bucky is looking up, and there is so much fury in Steve’s eyes. He can’t see the rest of his face, because he’s still wearing that mask, but the rage there as he rolls his shoulders back, it’s unmistakable, it’s something that Bucky has never seen on Steve’s face before. He’s seen him angry, sure, like a thundercloud, full of righteous fury at something someone said or did that betrayed Steve’s personal code of conduct, but this, this utter cold rage, this look of murder, it’s new. Bucky’s heart goes up in his ears, he can hear it, louder than it was during the fight, at the same time that his skin is covered in goosebumps.

Rumlow is pushing through, reaching his hand out but not for Bucky, for someone - something else - and Bucky doesn’t see it in time, he doesn’t see the syringe until Rumlow’s pressing the needle into his skin. “No, _no_ ,” is all he manages, because there is nothing good that comes from being knocked out this way-

-but the silence is all encompassing, and the last thing that Bucky sees before the world turns fuzzy and gray is the blood dripping from Steve’s arm, and all that he can think is _buddy, buddy, I’m coming for you, just you wait and see._

~~~~~

Sam really likes his life.

Sure, there are things about it that could be improved. It would be nice, for instance, if he didn’t feel like every single week he wasn’t reassuring his mother that just because he hasn’t gone on a real date in a couple of months doesn’t mean that he is going to die alone, and it would be even nicer if he could find fattoush somewhere in the general vicinity of where he lives, but in general. In general, Sam likes his life a lot. His job is good, his pay is good, and he only really has to answer to himself, and frankly, himself doesn’t ask a lot out of him that he’s not willing to do.

The morning run is really about it, and even then, it’s only on Monday mornings, right before work. Tuesdays, he’s accepted his lot in life, but Mondays, those are hard.

This Monday, he’s taking his usual jog around the National Mall, trying to get his head on straight for the rest of the week. He has a few group counseling sessions at the VA and then a couple of private ones; a few meetings and a dinner with some buddies from college, and a doctor’s appointment, just a check-up. 

The problem with these runs is that usually he can tune out most anything, but there are limits. First there’s a man running by him, which is easy enough to ignore, right up until Sam realizes the man is in a suit, and his brain catches up with that. “Dude-” he starts, but then Sam bears down and runs faster. Anyone running like that, in a suit, at six in the morning, they’re in trouble.

Secondly, suddenly, Sam is getting shot at.

It’s like being in the pararescue all over again, and immediately Sam feels every inch of himself as a soldier, and not a VA counselor anymore. He speeds up and reaches for the guy, his hand on the man’s arm. The man is bald, and looks terrified, and Sam doesn’t know what’s up with the bullets but god he hopes, really hopes, that this is not the bad guy in this scenario.

“Let go-” the man says, and shakes his head, yelling, somehow, while running, “get out of here, trust me, just _get out of here_!”

Sam turns and suddenly there is a man in black bearing down on his left, a man with a mask, because _what the hell_ , and the second Sam’s arm isn’t touching the bald man in the suit’s, the man in black overtakes them with a burst of speed that’s not just ridiculous, it’s _absolutely insane_.

And he literally runs over the other man, and he keeps _running_ after, and Sam, well.

Sam calls 911, first, and then immediately sees if the guy is okay - he’s not.

He’s dead.

It only took a second. Sam’s seen some majorly jacked-up shit in his time: he’s seen people die in horrible ways, he’s seen men killed and he relives those deaths behind his eyes some nights, but he has never seen it done this fast, this personally, and this _impersonally_.

He thanks every bit of training that keeps him from being terrified at this moment, even though he knows he has a lot to worry about. He’s a relatively young black man in a hoodie next to a dead white guy in a suit, and every warning, every single warning his mother gave him about appearances rings in his head, so he takes his sweater off so he’s only in his shirt, ties his hoodie around his waist, and then he gets on the ground next to the man’s body. His first instinct says not to look for ID - don’t give anyone a reason to think he’s robbing the body or something - so he just stays still and keeps his hands to himself, and tries to remember the event, both seconds of it, in enough detail to give it to the cops.

But the cops aren’t the ones who show.

Oh, they’re dressed like detectives, and the woman, a red-haired woman with a serious look to her face, shows him her badge: something about her is familiar. But they don’t move like cops. They move like special ops. 

Still, Sam knows better than to say anything, and she crouches down, looks for ID, as Sam explains it. “I was just running and they came out of nowhere. Him and a man in black, who ran him over and took off. When I stopped, he was dead. It took a second.”

The woman frowns as she finds the man’s wallet and a work badge, and Sam is _sure_ they’re not cops then, because she pockets them while the other guy, a spook looking guy, starts to check the perimeter. “Have I seen you somewhere?” Sam asks, and he’s not entirely sure why he asks it. He doesn’t really want to prolong this anymore than he has to, but at the same time, he doesn’t like how she just lifted the man’s ID.

“Does that actually ever work for you?” she asks, the smile on her face beguiling in its own way. 

Sam didn’t mean it as a pick up, he really didn’t, but hey, who is he to deny that kind of a smile. And that’s when it registers, like a wrecking ball straight into his frontal lobe. “The Avengers, right?”

Her smile doesn’t falter for a second, and she laughs. “No, but thanks. I get that a lot. Hey, James!” she calls, to her partner, who turns lifting his head from where he’s looking at something on the ground. “He says I look like that one Avenger, the girl.”

“Don’t stroke her ego, man, I’m the one who has to work with her,” James replies, shaking his head, and coming over. “I got what I need.”

“Ready to call in forensics?” she asks, and he nods. The woman has been so distracting, so Sam only really looks at the guy now. He looks like he hasn’t slept in three days, running on fumes. He’s wearing gloves, even though it’s March and there is no call for gloves, not in D.C. 

Special ops, man. 

“Do I need to stay?” Sam asks, and James shakes his head even as Sam keeps talking. “I’ll just need to call into work.”

The woman is looking at James with some kind of intention that Sam can’t read. “Can you give us any more description?” she asks, turning slowly from James to look at Sam again.

“Come on, he barely saw the guy, right?” James says, the impatience in his voice clear, and now the woman looks annoyed. “We should let him get back to work, or hell, call it in, take a day and go watch a movie or something, god knows you probably need a break.”

“Sounds like you could use one, too,” Sam suggests, slipping into his _thoughtful counselor_ voice. They both look at him, sharply, and Sam holds his hands up to placate them. “You know, or not, I’m just saying.”

The woman’s smile is the same, but Sam is no fool. He’s seen through so many faked smiles, so many attempts at manipulation, that he catches the slight brittleness of it, the kindness gone just slightly sour. “It’s fine. Long shifts. Look, if you remember anything-”

“Tash-” James groans, but she ignores him, and fixes Sam with a look.

He thinks for a second she’s going to finish that statement, maybe with a card or a phone number, but there isn’t anything like that. Instead there’s just silence. “Oh. Right now?”

James snorts, and the woman shakes head. “It’s fine,” she says, and turns to James. The rest of the “cops” are showing up, now. “You go ahead, thanks for your help.”

“Anytime,” Sam replies, even though nothing here adds up. He’s no spy. He was never good at that sort of thing. It takes a lot of out of him, though, to walk away from this. Maybe it was that no one should die that way.

But really, he realizes, it was that look on James’ face. That tight look, that he had for seconds, when the woman asked Sam if he remembered anything, that look that said that maybe he knew something, and he didn’t want Sam to blow his cover.

But by the time he realizes that, and heads back, everything - the cops, the body, the special ops detectives, are gone.

~~~~~~

He’s pretty sure that this - whatever this is - isn’t actually real. He’s sitting on the fire escape in a work shirt and rolled up trousers, his feet bare. This is a habit that Steve used to try and break him of. It’s their first apartment, which was on the sixth floor, a little shithole with barely any running water, but it was snug during the winter. He can see half of Brooklyn from that fire escape, glinting in a way that he’ll never forget and won’t ever be replicated, not with modern streetlights. There’s nothing like the glow of gaslight, the way it tinged the air.

But even though he knows it isn’t real, he goes along with it, because this is so much easier than figuring out what’s happening _now_. He used to do this, back in Germany, when they had him strapped down, he used to escape, and he always went to the same place. But back then, it was a different Steve who he saw, sitting in the corner, sketching away. It was the tiny, delicate guy he knew his whole life, who he loved like a brother right up until the point he didn’t.

This time it’s the Steve he knew for only a little while, the Steve whose back he had, day after day, who he never loved like a brother, but keenly, sharply, with a fierce desire. He used to have to go into the woods and get off quick in the mornings when he woke up next to him, when they were curled up together even though Steve wasn’t cold anymore. 

That’s the Steve who, when he turns, he sees now, sitting on the edge of a chair, leaning back into it, looking away. He’s dressed like he would in the forties, in trousers and a shirt, but it’s fitted, too fitted, like he got Bucky’s clothes and squeezed into them. He looks like some kind of Greek statue, it’s obscene, and he’s got one hand right on his thigh, the other scratching his chin. “Hey,” Bucky starts to say, and when Steve’s hand moves to his crotch, to press and palm there, Bucky swears he gets as hard as a rock in less time than it takes to suck in another breath. 

“Buddy-” he starts again, but Steve isn’t listening to him, he’s looking right at him, those bright blue eyes focused on him as he keeps rubbing at his own dick, his thumb pressing against the outside outline of his erection. Bucky’s gaze keeps moving, from Steve’s face to his crotch, and he moves forward, pushes Steve’s hand away, kisses him on the mouth, like he’s wanted to since he was seventeen and realized that the only person who he wanted to look at him the way that his mother looked at his father was Steve Rogers.

He’s tried. He’s tried to be good, he’s tried to keep Steve good, he’s tried to keep this to himself, but now he can’t anymore, not when his brain is providing this, and he feels _filthy_ , he feels like he’s destroying something precious, he feels _taboo_ and worse he doesn’t care, not even a little bit.

Steve groans into his mouth, and that noise, that _noise_ , Bucky doesn’t know how his brain manufactured that noise. He doesn’t know how his brain is manufacturing any of this, but the longer this goes on, the more Bucky tries to touch Steve beyond that kiss, the more that it feels unreal, the more that he can’t, he _can’t_ -

He wakes up with a jolt, his erection painful, his head feeling like someone’s taken the business end of a hammer to the side of his skull. Everything hurts. Every side of him, every muscle, and he reaches - with his left hand - for something to stabilize him, because he feels like maybe he’s falling a bit.

He leans over and throws up, the sides of his stomach pressing together until there’s nothing left, and that’s when the lights come on, harsh overhead. He tries to remember what Natasha told him about this scenario, things about disorientation and things about being drugged and things about taking stock of his environment, but the only thing that his mind can conjure is the image of Steve, sitting in that chair, his hand rubbing on his cock like-

-like-

-God, Bucky can’t even finish that thought. 

Rumlow comes through the door a second later. “Christ, Barnes,” he starts, looking down, at where the tightness of his blacks isn’t hiding a thing, “get it together.”

Bucky doesn’t even have the wherewithal to be embarrassed. He just gives Rumlow a look, which he thinks is nasty, but he knows, considering his current mental state, is probably more pathetic than he’d really like. “What the hell is going on, Rumlow?” he asks, and it’s slurred, it’s almost desperate.

“I was going to bring you in eventually, you know. I didn’t want to keep you out. You’re good, but I wasn’t sure of you. And see, now I have a problem. The higher ups, they think you’re good, too,” Rumlow says, and Bucky is getting real sick real quick of this cryptic bullshit. Things start to slot into his head, as Rumlow is speaking, though, so he lets his brain catch up, lets the guy keep talking. “We don’t want to kill you.”

“But you’re going to,” Bucky says, and that gives him a chill. He can’t let them kill him, not if Steve is a part of it. He doesn’t know what’s going on with his best friend, why he acts like he doesn’t know who he is, if he’s been brainwashed or something. But if the fight confirmed anything, it’s that it was Steve, only Steve moves that way. He absolutely cannot die without knowing what’s going on with Steve. Without saving him, if he has to.

Rumlow waits just long enough to make a point, his mouth flattened like a line. Bucky regrets ever liking the asshole. “Not if you decide to join us.”

Bucky has to parse that, for a second. Rumlow is serious, the man doesn’t joke around about this kind of thing. His sense of humor is restricted to strictly inappropriate comments during missions about how they would all be warmer if they just bombed the place and went home. 

(Although, now, Bucky isn’t sure if those are _jokes_.) 

But Bucky can’t just say yes. It’s not in his nature. “Are you fucking Sitwell?” is what he asks, instead, turning his head to look at Rumlow. 

Rumlow smacks him in the mouth for that; not a serious hit, nothing really painful, but something more like what a mother cat does to a kitten, a smack of _pay attention!!_ more than anything else. Bucky frowns and looks up at him. “I’m going to take that as a yes.”

Rumlow gives him a look that suggests that his patience is running _really_ low. “Yes or no, Barnes. You have thirty seconds before I leave and fill this place with Zyklon B.”

Bucky puts his right hand on his head, closes his eyes, and there’s no real choice there, even though he thinks that Rumlow’s choice of weapon is disgusting. “Yeah, okay,” he says, because he knows that’s the end of the recruitment speech. Rumlow won’t tell him what that entails or who they are until Bucky agrees. “I’ll join up, I’ll join up,” he says, because it’s not about his life, it’s about Steve, and Bucky can do anything if it means he’ll save Steve. He has an entire lifetime of wrongs to atone for committed in the singular act of hurting him, in the singular act of daring to imagine that a world without Steve Rogers could even exist.

(No, that’s not right. This isn’t atonement. This is everything that Bucky is. Everyone thought that Steve was Bucky’s shadow, because Bucky was taller and handsomer and more charismatic, but it’s always been the other way around. There’s nowhere Steve would go that wouldn’t have Bucky two steps behind him.)

“Welcome to Hydra,” Rumlow says with a smirk.

Well.

That explains the Zyklon B.

~~~~~

Karla was, once upon a time, a health-care professional. She had a clinic for soldiers, and people who had PTSD from things that happened in war-time environments. It was the kind of clinic that got recommended by VA hospitals and doctors seeing anyone with PTSD; it had a good reputation.

It doesn’t exist anymore, and Karla thinks that she’s better for having gotten her license revoked for malpractice. It was all that they could do to her, really, even though some prosecutors made noise about a criminal trial, no one could really prove lasting damage, not yet. And by the time they do, well, it will be well past any statute of limitations, Karla is sure. And in any case, what she did, it was for the betterment of more than simply the men who she did it too (and three women, the medical board insists on adding). 

It took Hydra to recognize that.

Now she is one of the head technicians on the Winter Soldier project. She does not like the name, she finds it gaudy, really, maybe a little too philosophical, it touches a part of her logical core that she does not particularly care to examine. If she had been in charge - or alive, perhaps - in the 1940s, when this project was initiated, she would have insisted on a numerical code, some number that could be stamped on the inside of the thing’s arm. Instead, it has a tattoo, a red star, inked into the back of its neck. Poetic. She would have used a barcode.

She is one of the unique technicians who is not afraid of it. The medical team, who do barely anything, when the asset’s healing factor is taken into account, have to almost be threatened into treating any wound it has. The rest of the technicians scurry around. She does not. It cannot hurt her. It is part of its programming.

It comes back from a mission, and she barely looks at it as his handler guides him into the room. There are other men there, with guns, but she doesn’t even concern herself. Her programming is perfect; the missions in its head, the details she puts in there, are masterfully done. She does not feel the need to be humble about it.

“Soon we won’t need him anymore, you know that,” Pierce says from behind her, and she turns just a bit from her computer to look at him. He is one of the few men she’s met who can intimidate her, even a little bit. “What are you going to do then?”

“Don’t you think you’ll want something with a little bit more of a personal touch?” she asks, not letting that intimidation show. It is the kind of woman she is. People here think she is cold, but her patients, before, years ago, thought she was kind enough. Kind enough that they agreed to her clinical trials. 

Pierce laughs a bit as they strap him in. “He’s good for discipline, I’ll give you that,” he says, watching this procedure. Every day, it is the same thing, sometimes more than once a day. “He scares the shit out of every agent on the field.”

She snorts a bit, and shrugs. “It is only a tool,” she points out. “It is the hand that wields it that they should really fear.”

Pierce doesn’t seem to have an opinion on this, and does not agree, or disagree, with this statement. This is why they get along so well, on a certain level. They can have these conversations, the kind where they are speaking of something of this level of importance, and barely look at each other, and things still get accomplished. They both know that she is talking about Pierce. There is nothing dubious about that.

“Well,” Pierce finally says, breaking the silence. “It would keep you around, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m not so concerned about my job security in a post-helicarrier world,” she assures him, “I know you value my work.” 

He hears that pause, that but, the one that is in her head. The asset is being patched into its headpiece, now. She has been working to crack some of the triggers, but it is delicate, to change them from Russian to English. And it is easy enough to add them. But the Soviet who did the original work, who planted the map of his brain, was good, excellent, the best. The work is masterful.

She hates it on principle, as much as she admires the utter seamless craftsmanship.

“I do,” he finally admits. “All right,” he says, and taps the top of her computer, like it’s doing a good job, instead of the person behind it. “Get the job done. We’re almost there.”

Karla finishes the current program, and hits the enter key to upload, and sits back. The asset feels pain, acutely, even if it cannot complain nor do anything about it, even though it heals quickly enough that twenty minutes after the procedure is complete, all that’s left is, she imagines, the twinges of the electricity, the settling of it. But the entire upload can take anywhere from ten minutes to ten hours, and the entire time, it is probably (she imagines) in some form of intense pain or another.

It’s not her problem, its pain. It’s her job. She watches it in its chair, his eyes open. There are moments, she thinks, that without the electric shock, she might be afraid of what it would do to her, if it could lift a muscle to get out, moments where the program probably is overridden with enough adrenaline that it can control everything again. But they are, like its pain, not really any kind of concern. 

Actually, it’s mesmerizing, to watch him suffer. Not because it does it gracefully, or because its pain is beautiful, like the cliche of a dominatrix might be (and Karla is not a dominatrix, no matter what the techs may think) but because pain is fascinating in almost any capacity. It was the predominant cause of her specialty, really, to watch people in pain, to assess that, to interpret it. And that gave her the supreme ability to inflict it, with absolute conviction and a calm casual air. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not really as if its pain means anything.

It can’t possibly hurt her, after all.


	5. Chapter 5

People who knew him, back in Brooklyn when he was a kid, they’d never accuse him of patience. Bucky had that kind of personality. _Loud_ if they were being accusative. _Charismatic_ , if they were charmed by him. _Sweet_ , if they caught him on a good day, or _single-minded_ on a bad, but never _patient_. Even now people might not think that about him, not when he gets cranky in planes or annoyed at especially long lines. 

But there is a special kind of art to the patience required in sniping; the slow lull of quiet and silence, the nothingness of thought, the ability to sink into just being, for a while, for a long time. Hours. Days. Bucky knows men who can make incredible, breath-taking shots, but they don’t have the art of waiting. But Bucky does. In 1935, he waited seven whole months before he gave Charlie Spinelli the ass-whooping of the century for beating Steve up every day. Each day Steve would come home to Sarah with a shiner, hanging off Bucky’s shoulder, saying _I had him on the ropes_ and each day Steve would ask him to just _leave it alone_ and each day Bucky would reply _I’ll leave it alone today, buddy_ and _every day_ Bucky would wind his way home past where Spinelli lived, counting down the hours.

It wasn’t rage that fueled him on the day he finally just took the other kid out. It was just the knowledge, months back, that there would be a day where Steve would get pneumonia or Steve would be buried deep in remedial schoolwork or Steve would be spending all his time doing _something_ , or another, and Bucky could do it with all the leisure it deserved, and Steve wouldn’t know. God. That kid was more like a sweetheart than any girl could hope to match, so it was no wonder that Bucky pictured his face every time he came from 1934 to 1945. 

Patience. It’s what Bucky has. And that’s what Bucky needs, to survive this.

The moment he heard Hydra, his internal system went into a kind of panic; what the hell, he wanted to demand, did they do to Steve? He wanted to break Rumlow’s neck. Who the hell, what kind of _person_ , what kind of sane, rational person, joins _Hydra_?

The only answer Bucky had at the moment was that there were two kinds of people: the kind that joined Hydra because they were lacking in hefty amounts of healthy emotions, and possibly had chunks of their souls missing (Rumlow) or people who were desperate, who had no choice, who had reached the bottom of the proverbial barrel and were trying to find a clawhold back into some semblance of control.

Which is of course, Bucky.

So he didn’t snap Rumlow’s neck. He sunk into the deep wellspring of patience so sorely needed in his line of work, kept his mouth shut, and did what he was told.

It’s been months.

It is a strange sort of unease, like having a sniper’s nest on something uneven, but having to deal with it because that’s the angle of the shot. After the endless initiations, after learning how to say _Hail Hydra_ without immediately having to go throw up, awash in memories of 1943, after the initial few days when he was back in his apartment and the only thing that kept him from going right to Fury was the thought of Steve, things got oddly better. Like getting used to an injury - it only hurt when he dug into it, and even then, less and less the longer it went on.

Of course it went on. They don’t let him see Steve, and he can’t just ask, not outright, not so soon. Bucky isn’t like Steve, headon isn’t his most flattering angle, and whatever Steve is - the Winter Soldier, _whatever_ , it’s _Steve_ \- isn’t exactly common around the Hydra watercooler. Whatever he’s being used for, it’s not always beating up new potential recruits.

It’s three months down the line and Bucky still feels like he’s lying down in position, waiting for the mark, when he spots Denisof swearing and muttering after a mission. He hasn’t seen Denisof much, lately; Rumlow put Bucky back on Natasha’s watch after a month, and he’s never had a chance to talk to Denisof alone. “You’re going to wear a hole in the ground, pacing like that,” he says, giving a short, sharp nod.

Denisof looks up and the tension doesn’t entirely leave his body, but he relaxes a bit. He doesn’t move any closer, a fact that Bucky’s grateful for, because there’s only so much even Bucky’s patience can take, and if Denisof touches him Bucky’ll break his hand with his metal one. “You know those days when everything is crap?”

“I’ve had a couple, sure,” Bucky replies, leaning back against the wall. This is an opportunity, really. Denisof is Steve’s handler, Bucky _knows_ that, just from having seen Steve in action a couple of times. “Who hasn’t?”

Denisof looks around a moment, just a moment, making sure no one else is around them, and then he moves closer. Bucky doesn’t move away, but he’s not letting Denisof go in for any kind of _hug_ , but fortunately Denisof stops just where Bucky can hear. “Your grandfather was a Howling Commando, right?”

Bucky blinks slowly, and nods. He is not sure where this line of questioning is going - around here he fields it about once a month. Once, Natasha and Clint sat him down and made him watch Futurama, and Bucky pointed out he was a lot smarter than Fry, and also a roomba wasn’t exactly a robot, but then they made him watch the episode where Fry is his own grandfather, and they laughed like loons over it. Bucky just shook his head, back then. And threw a pillow at Clint’s head.

Now, he treats the question like it was something serious. “But I didn’t know the guy. Don’t get the wrong idea.”

“Don’t you feel like you’re betraying something?” Denisof asks, and Bucky realizes that Denisof isn’t really asking about Bucky. He’s asking about himself. And for whatever reason, he chose Bucky as his way to figure it out, which suits Bucky fine.

After all, Denisof is the one who spends the most time with Steve, isn’t he?

So Bucky pushes up off the wall. “I’m definitely not talking about that without a drink. How long are you off?” he asks, and Denisof perks up so much that if he had a tail it would be _wagging_. 

They go for a drink, and a drink turns into two, and two turns into seven. Bucky realized, years ago, that he didn’t get drunk easily, either. It wasn’t as fast as it used to be; now he drinks and drinks and the buzz comes and leaves quickly, and it’s annoying but it serves at least a few purposes, and one of them is this. Denisof is very drunk, and he is moody as hell, black as anything. The stereotype of the drunk Russian runs a strong streak through him.

At first he clams up, but then Bucky starts making up some shit about what his “grandmother” told him about his “grandfather” and Captain America, and Denisof’s mood turns even more sour, but he starts talking. “You know,” he says, under his breath, “you chase around a myth for a living and suddenly everything in your life takes a really sharp turn in regards to perspective,” he says. “I bet your grandfather knew that. How it changes you. How you start feeling like shit about it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Bucky says casually, although he does, and it chews away at his stomach. Fuck this asshole for thinking he understood anything about what he and Steve did together.

Denisof takes another drink. “The Winter Soldier, that’s what I’m talking about. The asset. The myth, the fucking myth,” he snarls, “I’m his handler, and half of this organization, they shit themselves when they think about it, and they shit themselves when they think about me. Like I control him.”

Bucky doesn’t make like he’s surprised. Denisof is pretty under the table, and another drink will have him not even remembering the barest bone of this conversation. “Don’t you?”

“Let me tell you,” Denisof says, “What the scientists do to him, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen that and it’s - I’d slit my own throat before I let them do that to me,” he says, and Bucky feels an urgency. “And after everything is said and done, after they lift the Helicarriers - I don’t know. Maybe they’ll do what they do do him to all of us.”

Finally, Bucky thinks, but another part of him is sickened, another part of him doesn’t want to know. Regardless of what Bucky feels for Steve - the love notwithstanding - it’s his best friend, it’s the man who taught him what it meant to be a good person. So far everything’s been _what they’ve done to Steve_ in the abstract. “What are they doing to him?”

“They program him. Like a computer. It hurts, I’ve heard him scream, I’ve watched them do it, they program him and it’s...they like it.” Denisof looks down at his drink. “Look, no one said we were saints, but I came here to build-”

“Stop,” Bucky says, sharply, “Don’t kid yourself, Denisof,” he says, and he’s growling, he’s shaking. “We’re not building anything good here. We’re taking over the world,” he says, because he knows, he knows whose pocket he’s in better than anyone, “so don’t kid yourself.” He goes quiet for a long time. “Where do they keep him?” he tries, hedging his bets.

“Are you kidding me, Barnes? I’m not that drunk,” Denisof says, and Bucky nods. 

During the war, during the thickest part of it, Jones caught a Nazi spy. It was mostly because Jones was brilliant, not just smart but _Stark_ smart, almost, without any of the insufferableness attached, but some of it was luck, too. They caught him and Phillips wanted him, but Steve refused to turn him over to command without promise of a trial, a _fair_ trial, on grounds that they would torture him. He was just a kid. A dumb kid who spoke English without an accent.

Everyone sat there at that meeting, with Steve and Phillips yelling it out, because Steve had stashed him and wouldn’t tell anyone outside of the Commandos where, and the Commandos weren’t going to spill, either. It was war, sure, but Steve was their commanding officer, and more important than that, he was their friend. 

Steve wouldn’t let the guy go back, either, though, on account that he would be killed by the Nazis, and the guy knew it. He knew exactly how lucky he was, and he wasn’t going to ruin that. Bucky remembered the conversation, he remembered how easy it was to agree with Steve about it. Torture, he knew, was awful. This guy, this one person who Steve refused to give over because death was a side effect of war, but torture, that was another thing entirely.

Bucky thought he could be that kind of man, but Bucky’s principles slip to the wayside where Steve is concerned. He leaves Denisof’s body a wreck, an unrecognizable mess of bones and blood, and dumps it just outside of the range of the cameras at one of the Hydra bases. 

~~~~~

Natasha gets her hair done once every two months; she has a standing appointment at ten in the morning, second Tuesday. It’s the kind of thing that she bends time and space for, if she can. She is one of the best SHIELD agents, one of the most skilled assassins on the planet, and frankly, six times a year, a couple of hours to herself for a trim or a haircut, a deep conditioning, and a scalp massage is really the least she could ask for. 

Her stylist is one of the few friends she has who can’t kill a man with her pinkie, and having someone to talk to about things outside of work once in a while definitely makes it better, but today, she’s just enjoying the silence as Amber works her hands through Natasha’s hair and her fingers over the top of her scalp.

It’s been a strange few months. For one thing, James - who she privately thinks of as _Bucky_ , but never calls that - has been acting strangely. He never ignores her, of course not, and he always returns her calls in a timely way, and he’s doing his work the same as usual, but there is something about him that’s different. He doesn’t talk to her the same way, and she’s not sure if it’s the job that’s finally hit him, or if he’s missing home again. It’s concerning; not having James at full capacity is dangerous, for starters, and if he doesn’t like the job he shouldn’t be doing it, at all. 

(There’s a part of Natasha, the part that she keeps tightly bottled under lock and key, that worries about him on a completely different level, that worries about him as a _friend_ , as someone who is sweet to her when he doesn’t have to be, who teases her just the right amount, who treats her like her feelings matter when she feels the most vulnerable. It is a rare skill to see past Natasha’s walls and to the core of her, and James has it, and so she feels protective of him, too. But she cannot think like that. Not when their job means so much.)

And that, added to the attack on Deputy Director Hill just days ago and the murders of SHIELD analysts, not to mention the upcoming Helicarrier initialization, it hasn’t been a particularly _soothing_ kind of week.

Her stylist is working in silence, still, and everything would be fine - at least, Natasha would consider it _fine_ , right up until Natasha feels that something’s off. The silence, maybe, or the quality of the light, or maybe it’s just that she’s so highly pulled, like a wire, that anything tiny rings throughout her quickly. She looks up at Amber. “Is it really eleven? I’m late,” she says, with an apologetic smile, and grabs her wallet, pushing a hundred into Amber’s hands.

“I haven’t even dried your hair,” Amber protests, “Natasha-” she starts, but Natasha is already up and out of the chair, sopping wet hair against her shoulders. The fact that she has to go out into the streets of D.C. with wet hair and therefore a wet shirt isn’t lost on her, and the irritation is pretty plain on her face.

It’s the files, she thinks. The ones that she and Maria couldn’t crack, the ones that she picked up off the analyst months ago and only started to look at now, after the third murder, and the second set of files in a flashdrive. It’s the files and her brain, finally relaxed under the water and Amber’s hands massaging her scalp, finally clicked together. Natasha is not a hacker, and she and Maria couldn’t just get another analyst to do the brunt of the computer work, not without risking their life, too. Whoever was killing analysts was working from the inside, and Natasha’s known it for months.

She doesn’t go to the Triskelion. Instead she goes to an internet cafe, and says fuck it to safety. She wishes, for a minute, that she had James with her, because having someone with eyes in the sky would be at the least reassuring, but now too much of this is coming together. Sitwell being tagged, the dead bodies piling up, the targeting of Maria, all signs pointed to _mole_ , but a mole to _what_? 

Her time with Tony Stark - working “for” him - didn’t do much for her resume, but what it did do was sharpen some of her technical skills. She runs a decryption as she squeezes her hair out onto the floor of the internet cafe, knowing that it’s probably annoying the teenage clerk, who is too caught in an internal struggle with his job and his attraction to her to know what to do, and considers straightening her hair right now.

She’s straightened her hair in more inconvenient places.

The decryption hits on something, and Natasha isn’t sure why it never hit on this when she and Maria were running other programs. It might be luck, or it might just be the way fate does strange things, but at the end it doesn’t matter. It’s a list she finds, and she recognizes it right away: it’s a list of _targets_ , and the top name on it is _Tony Stark_ , followed by other names, prominent names. It takes her a moment to analyze it, and she recognizes the danger immediately, and the flash drive from the computer, pockets it, and heads back into the street.

She makes the first agent ten seconds in, the second another second after that. Her hand goes to her purse - she has a gun in there, and a couple portable electroshocks (James calls them her bites, and she doesn’t stop him), but not much else - and her hand fixes around one of the tiny round bite, and curves it into her palm. She knows exactly how serious this is; she read the unencrypted list, and she knows, too in a vague sort of way, what they plan to do. “Boys,” she says, “let’s not do anything we’ll regret.”

She’s not sure who fires first, but she doesn’t care, because she’s already moving. Natasha is good at this, the _best_ at this, the best at surviving these kinds of things without an extraction, and part of her is pleased she’s on her own for this. She’s running, and they’re running after her, and they’re tearing up the street doing it, too, which is a bad sign. When all hopes of subtlety are abandoned, one knows they are well and truly screwed over. 

But Natasha specializes in screwed over. 

A black van screeches to a stop in front of her, and she turns on her toes, putting every second of ballet training to use as she pivots and heads in another direction at the same time that the door of the van opens. Natasha doesn’t bother to wait, to see who or what comes out of that van, because she has a feeling she already knows.

The Winter Soldier has been a myth in the intelligence community since before Natasha was born; a bogeyman for bad little spies who didn’t pay attention to their handlers. Back when Coulson was still working closely with Clint, back when occasionally Natasha would cross paths with him, she would hear those stories. Coulson liked to tell them and Clint liked to snicker about them, and they all thought it was just a story.

Until the other night when Kenyon died, and the only thing that saved them was Natasha flinging him off the car into the river. 

Her heart speeds up, then. Some of the trainees think that Natasha is never afraid, but that’s not true. She feels fear just as often as anyone else, but it’s her response to it that makes her different, the ability to ingest that fear and still function, still work. She supposes she has a thirty second lead, but she’s seen how fast this man can move, and that lead won’t last the full thirty seconds she’s powered down the street, so she finds the closest side street and veers again, tossing a bite across the street to land on a street light as she ducks behind a low garden wall.

Not three seconds later the Winter Soldier veers the same way she did, and she triggers the bite. Without the light being on, the bite just forces the light to flicker, but that’s enough to make him look up, and in that half second she’s on him, on his back. He’s bigger than she anticipated, but Natasha is a small woman, and she’s used to fighting men bigger than she is.

He doesn’t throw her right away, he can’t, because she’s got a garrote around his neck, except that then, suddenly, it isn’t. The tension leaves the string, and she’s collapsing forward over his shoulder. She tries to use his arms as a springboard, like some strange vaulting horse, only his hands clasp over her hips and he slams her to the ground using her momentum.

The air in her lungs slams out of her, too, and it’s only training that makes her even aware that he’s got a gun in his hand, when suddenly he’s no longer there.

“ _No,_ ” is what she hears, and when she gets up she sees James, his metal hand trying to pin the Soldier, but failing. “Natasha, _run!_ ” he yells, and it’s a war, then, a personal battle. She can’t just leave him, can she? _Why is he here?_

That’s what sticks in her mind as he keeps twisting, and finally the Soldier rights himself, James be damned. James is still struggling, still fighting for some amount of purchase, clinging like a limpet, when one of the black vans comes careening down the street, and James _lets go_ , hissing, “ _Run_.”

Natasha runs, slipping into the sewer at the first chance, something afforded to her due to her tiny frame. It is a place even James can’t follow.

~~~~~

Bucky doesn’t get home until long, long after dark. Rumlow arrives on scene minutes after Natasha left, gets furious, but doesn’t punch anyone. Bucky sits there as Steve keeps moving - his shoulders, and his head, like there’s a bit of muscle that’s stiff that he just can’t fix, and Bucky tries his best - his absolute fucking best - to not reach out and try and release that tension. It was the closest he’s managed to get in the months he’s been in Hydra, the first time he’s touched him.

He is in the foulest mood, but when he opens his door and sees Natasha sitting in a chair, gun pointed at his head, he knows that his mood doesn’t even compare. “Get in,” she says, calmly. “Close the door,” she tells him, and he does as he’s told. “You’re a traitor,” is her final statement, a damning nail in a coffin, and it’s all true, so he doesn’t deny it. He betrayed his job, and his country, and most of his ethics, except the only one that mattered.

“Natasha,” he starts, but then he looks at her face and he stutters quiet. They stay still like that, for a long time. To her credit, she doesn’t ask him why he did it, doesn’t point out that he pretty much died to take out Hydra, that Steve would hate him for this, which is all well and good because those are questions he focuses on at least seventeen times a day.

But then, he guesses, from her face, that she doesn’t care about those things. “I should kill you,” she says, and he moves slightly, and she raises the gun sharply, and he holds his hands out. “You can sit over there, as soon as you disarm everything on the table, slowly, so I can see,” she says, pointing to the chair next to his table. He knows that means she already scoped it, although he doesn’t keep anything there that would even remotely be considered a weapon. 

So he goes, disarms, and he sits. And she keeps her gun trained on him, and after another minute, she finally manages to speak, this time the hardness in her voice gone. But it doesn’t make her vulnerable. She may not be a stone anymore, but she’s still serious. “I should turn you in,” she says, “I should let Fury tear you apart.”

“Please don’t,” he replies, but doesn’t provide a defense. He can’t just let it go. He’s been holding this from her for months now, he’s been doing dirty, filthy things, all with the hopes of getting closer to Steve, to figure out what’s happened to him, to try and _fix_ it, because every time he sees him it’s like the world has slotted back into place, like everything is right. He can’t just let that go. And if he tells Natasha, she’ll-

She’ll what?

His brain always stutters to a close when he’s trying to figure out exactly _what_ it is that Natasha will do. 

Her mouth purses shut; the spy in her isn’t going to let anything through, not while she’s deciding. Finally, she speaks. “I didn’t call SHIELD yet,” she says, and he knows what that means - she’s giving him a chance to explain himself.

Or she’s going to kill him.

“It’s Steve,” he finally says, and his entire body feels like one enormous bruise, all tender and aching, like saying the words out loud finally makes everything he’s done, like joining a Nazi organization, make sense. “The Winter Soldier. It’s Steve.”

Natasha puts her gun down, then.

“James,” she says, softly.

And then he knows. He knows that she understands, that she is absolutely aware of what’s in his head. He loves Natasha, he does, for more than the fact that she’s so beautiful that sometimes it hurts to look at her. He loves her because she gets what that absolute, unfaltering loyalty feels like. They are similar, in a way, even in the ways that they’re nothing alike at all.

Bucky tips forward, to put his head in his hands. “I have to save him, do you get that? I have to save him, I can’t just leave him there.”

She doesn’t say anything, at first. Finally she stands, holsters her gun, and moves to press her body against his back, her arms going around his stomach. “We better do it fast,” she whispers, “because they’re on the verge of doing something terrible, and if you’re a part of it, then I _have_ to kill you.”

He knows. They have a timeline. “I’ll help,” she finally says. “I’ll help you get him back.”

“Does this mean you forgive me?” he asks, his voice huskier than he expected it to be. He wants her to say no. He wants her to not forgive him, so that someone can make him take responsibility for this, when Steve is too brainwashed to do it.

And Natasha, she knows, because she shakes her head.

~~~~~

The first time it happened, he was half drunk, so of course he thought no, this is it, death is coming for me in the form of my old army Captain. But then he realized that he was only half drunk, and not on the floor clutching his liver in deep anguish, so it could not be a hallucination of death.

The second time it happened, it was hot as sin, and the night was as black as a Kraut’s asshole. Dernier doesn’t like to think of himself as a prejudiced man, but like his American friends, he can’t quite give up the ghost of hate towards the Germans – but then, he is French, and feels much more entitled to it. But sometimes he hates his countrymen, too, like tonight, where the Vietnamese air is suffocating him and he wonders why the fuck anyone thought that invading this beautiful, oppressively hot country was any kind of good idea.

Worse is what the Americans did, and that’s why he’s here, sitting on the porch and staring out into the blackness of an enormous field. The rest of his squad is here, too. And the second time it happens, he sees his Captain sitting in the eaves of the building in front of them, crouched in the darkness but still enormous, dressed in black and looking too comfortable in his own skin.

Dernier thinks, no, this is it, this is madness come knocking, finally, unforgiving. He has done terrible things and this is the result of it; this is what Gabe Jones lived to warn him about, yelling at him to _stop being an irrational asshole, and live to see another day_ , but Dernier never listened and so his Captain is here to make sure he knows just how _mad_ he is.

The third time it happens, it is the middle of the day, and Dernier is in the middle of a field, when he realizes he is not mad.

The fourth time it happens, it is because Dernier is in the pit of a blasted, infernal building somewhere in the middle of nowhere, wishing to death that he had done what his instinct had said and called Jones and Falsworth, at least, and not just come in here. He is, however, a Howling Commando to the bones of him, to the very marrow, and once he realized he was not mad, he realized, too, that he must really have seen his Captain, that his _Captain_ had survived, and that this was monumentally important. He had sat, patiently, and waited, until the Captain arrived again on the eaves of that same building, staring out at something (someone?) else, and followed him.

It was a dark alley where Dernier almost confronted him, but the words would not come, and another man took his Captain by the hand and led him down into this pit. It took a great deal of Dernier’s considerable skills, all acquired at the side of the same man that he was chasing down the dank hallways that likely led to hell (although he would never have said that his Captain was destined for hell, no, not even once, not even with the men that he killed and the things he did, because there was nothing as morally upright as Steve Rogers; he had Bucky to do the nasty, filthy things, the things that the good Captain never even knew about). But here he is, waiting, as the men swirling around his Captain strap him to a contraption, and speak in Russian, and mill about, waiting for something.

It takes an hour, before finally they leave, before finally they leave him, and Dernier moves in to unstrap him. “I don’t know how this happened-“ he starts to say, when he sees that his Captain is fast asleep, and he hits him, gently, on the top of the head. “Wake up,” he says, in English, then again in French, and the Captain’s eyes open.

There is something haunting there; it would break Bucky’s heart, is the first thing that Dernier thinks. There is something, or perhaps, better, there is a _lack_ of something, a deep and piercing coldness that alleviates even some of the tremendous heat on Dernier’s back. He looks at Dernier, and Dernier tries to undo the straps.

He swears loudly in French, then hushes his tone, and does not think as to why the Captain has not said anything – clearly these men are doing something to him, and he has no sense of his bearings. He finally undoes the last one and grabs his arm, and his Captain looks at him as he steps up and out, and there is a deep regret in his face. “Come, then,” Dernier says, “Barnes would not forgive me if I left you here.”

There is a sudden jolt, muscle pulling away, at the sound of Bucky’s name. Even in French, it is as though the Captain is acutely tuned to it, as if it is the pitch that he resonates at. Dernier hates that Steve is alive, and Bucky is dead. It seems wrong, for only one of them to exist at once.

They make it to the door before they are caught, his Captain stumbling a bit, shaking his head like a dog, his arm flexing below Dernier’s grip.

It does not last long, when they are. It takes a few words of Russian.

He thinks, for a moment, for the moment when the knife is only in his spine and not yet in his throat, that he should have blown the place up. That he should have done something. Because it will not be pleasant, what Barnes will do to him, if there is more than just darkness on the other side.

 

~~~~~

Maybe it was never meant to go this way.

Maybe, the way it was meant to go, was that Bucky died in the care of Hydra, in 1943, died strapped to a table, dreaming of Brooklyn and Steve and naps in the sunshine. 

Or maybe it was meant to go with Steve picking him up, and the two of them, curled together and around each other when the Valkyrie went down. Steve would have held him, made himself freeze first, they would have fought about it until the only thing to do was sleep, and freeze, and never be found.

Or even maybe, Bucky should have been the one, the one Hydra found, the one that got brainwashed and turned into a weapon.

Maybe it was never meant to go this way. But this is the way it goes.

The day that whatever Hydra is planning is meant to happen - and Bucky knows the _date_ , but he doesn’t know the _what_ , not really - is the day that they’re supposed to fall into action.

But this doesn’t happen on that day. Bucky tells Natasha that he’ll do anything, but he can’t in good conscience do it without knowing what’s happening with Steve, and so the thing he’s been holding off on doing - talking to the techs that run the Winter Soldier program - is the thing he has no choice but to do now. 

He had been holding off, because he had hoped not to involve them. In all the ways that mattered, Bucky still saw techs as _civilians_ , even though he knew better than anyone that scientists were capable of more atrocities than soldiers could ever dream of. He had hoped that he could find some way to get Rumlow to trust him enough, enough that he would pull Bucky aside and tell him that he needed a handler for the Winter Soldier since Denisof was found in bloody, hacked pieces. Then he could sit with him, for hours at a time, and figure it out, talk to him, try and work through the brainwashing. Hit him on the head, if necessary. It worked for Clint, didn’t it?

But now Bucky is making his way through a part of Hydra he’s never been in before, and he remembers exactly how well this went the last time he did this, but it turns out that everyone’s so stressed about whatever this mass genius genocide is, that no one cares if he strolls through secure areas dressed in his blacks. Natasha is overheard, up in a café across the street, waiting for an extraction. She has the getaway car, the tremendous cuffs that Bucky hopes will hold Steve in case he goes haywire, and a couple of elephant tranquilizers.

He sits with the technicians for almost two hours before one of them, a woman in a severe black coat, notices him, and moves over. “Can I help you?”

She does not look like she actually wants to help him, but he smiles anyway. “Are you in charge, here?”

“I am in charge of one of the divisions,” she says, crossing her arms over his shoulders, “and I don’t think you’re authorized to be here.”

“I’m the asset’s new handler,” he replies, casually, the lie coming out of his mouth so quickly that he doesn’t even stop to think about it. Yes, that’s right, he thinks, suddenly. There’s no saying if any of this is going to work, so he may as well go all in.

“Oh,” she says, suddenly, her eyes widening a bit. “I had not even thought -” she begins, but shakes her head. “Is Pierce continuing the project?”

He feels a chill race down the back of his spine - _is Pierce continuing the project_ \- just like that, just like that he knows. Whatever it is that will kill all those people, whatever it is that will do the job, it’s going to make Steve extraneous. 

He’s not sure how he keeps a straight face, then. “I don’t ask questions, I just show up where I’m told,” he replies, and she seems to accept that. 

She indicates for him to stand up, to follow her. “Denisof did this rather on the fly, but the asset has been difficult, lately, fighting the programming more than ever, so I’ll go through the routine with you,” she says, and Bucky just nods. He should have killed Denisof sooner, he thinks, if it was going to be this easy. The woman leads Bucky, and she’s talking about procedure: what do to when he arrives, how to handle things like basic human needs (although Bucky keeps his fist - the human one - clenched tightly when she dismisses things like hunger and cold and thirst, stating that his stamina is superhuman and so he only needs those things sparingly) and how _to never punch him._

That gets Bucky’s attention. “Wait, what?”

She doesn’t stop, simply sighs. “His programming can override most of the dormant personality, but we can’t seem to unprogram some of the more adamant responses. In a fight, he responds to that kind of violence without issue. But with his handlers, well. The whole duration of the program, he’s never let a single handler hit him, or even yell, really, without perceiving it as some kind of a threat.”

Bucky is suddenly transported back, just for the moment, to grade school. He’s curling Steve’s tiny fist round, showing him how to hold it straight, showing him how to keep his thumb tucked tight against his fingers, not inside, because _that’s a dumb way to get your thumb broken_. He’s doing this because Steve has a shiner that takes up half his face, and he’s finished letting his dumb best friend get pushed around like that.

“I’m not going to let anyone hit me again,” Steve promises, which is a dumb promise because it ends up broken about once a week. But what it does amount to is that he never lets anyone hit him again without hitting them back, which includes Bucky and friendly punches to the arm.

Bucky doesn’t say anything, then. He just follows, as she keeps talking, until they get to the chair where Steve is strapped down, a strange metal device over his head, and for the first time in years - decades, but who’s counting - he can see Steve’s face, just like that, _asleep._ She pauses, and tells him, “Russian only. Choose your triggers and speak clearly into the microphone. This is a list of the usual set, but anything in Russian will do for a command.” She turns the screen to Bucky, who peers into it - they are the kind of commands someone might give a dog.

Bucky does as he’s told. “Do you speak Russian?” he asks the woman.

She shakes her head, typing into the screen, and Bucky thinks about it, for a long minute. “Hang on,” he says, “I forgot the last one,” he says, and speaks an additional trigger into the microphone - one not on the list.

He watches this for a long moment, and finally the question that has been creeping on him for months, without him really understanding it, finally surfaces. He thinks it balloons out of his mouth, unchosen. “Does the dormant personality wake up?” he asks, then, interrupting her work. Because he has to know. _He has to know._

She shrugs. “Once in a while. It’s very annoying, when the screaming starts. I would say we should just wipe it entirely, but the original programming found that his eidetic memory was retained.” 

Bucky takes a second, then, and his gorge rises as he realizes exactly what that means. His gaze flickers back to her, and she seems absolutely unbothered by this. “Are you telling me he remembers everything? That he _knows_ who he is?”

She looks over at him with a look on her face, as if maybe she thinks he is being overly sentimental, or something like that. “In theory, yes,” she states. “But his actions are controlled strictly through triggers and programming. When he begins to shake it off, his behavior is erratic.” She does a flicking motion with her hand, as if to dismiss this all as - what? An annoyance? “He is unpredictable.”

Bucky looks around at the technicians in the room, all working at screens around Steve, all of them complicit in this, and even his patience can’t last forever.

In fact, considering the levels of rage he’s currently feeling, it’s a goddamned miracle that when he grabs the technician near him and levels a gun to her head, that he doesn’t pull the trigger and go on a mass killing spree. He knows how to get away with it, too - they still don’t know who killed Denisof.

Of course, when he killed Denisof, there weren’t cameras pointed at him, showing him with his gun pointed at Denisof’s head, and now there are. “Everyone, move _back_ , into that corner,” he says, sharply, and all the techs look up. It says something about Hydra - all the techs look pale from this violence, like they all do what they do with some measure of _obliviousness_ about their jobs.

“You are making a mistake,” the tech in his arms says, and she’s irritatingly calm. Bucky has never been one to want people to be afraid, but he wants this woman to be afraid now. He wants her to feel every single bit of terror that Steve’s felt, that _he_ felt, back in 1943, the first time that Hydra had him. “This is a bad idea. They will kill you for this. You are not the first to try to get him out.”

“You,” he says, gesturing quickly with the gun to one of the technicians, who starts to _shake_ , “wake him up.”

“Sofia, don’t do it,” the tech in his arms says, “if you wake it now, you’ll risk damaging the programming, and you know it.”

“If you don’t, I’ll shoot this one first, and then I’ll shoot you. And I’m fast enough that I could go through most of you before any of you could run, and you know it. So Sofia, sweetheart,” he says, flashing her a smile that he knows is probably just this side of _totally and absolutely insane_ , “wake him up.”

Sofia, apparently, doesn’t need any more encouragement, because suddenly she’s moving, hands flying over the computer, and the other techs are slow to start to unstrap him.

When he wakes up a moment later, he’s groggy, and Bucky is transported back to those early February mornings in 1939, back when Bucky still worked two jobs and had to take on an early shift helping Mr. Phelps, the local greengrocer, unload the day’s produce from the truck. Every morning that entire month, whenever Bucky woke up at four, Steve woke up too, just for a moment. He would look at Bucky with that same groggy expression he has now, his hair sticking straight up as he blinked at Bucky from his side of the room, and then he would turn and go back to sleep.

God, Bucky misses him.

All the technicians take a step back, not just careful but utterly _terrified_ , and Bucky surges forward, hostage in hand. “Are you the one in charge of this project?” he asks her, and he wants her, desperately, to say yes.

“Yes,” she says, “you are going to die,” she tells him, absolutely sure of it.

Steve is looking at him now, the grogginess fading from his eyes. There is a strange look to him, and he’s cocking his head to one side, and then another. The technicians are huddled in the back of the room, now, looking like cornered ducklings. One of them is crying.

“You did this,” Bucky confirms, and she nods, annoyingly calm, and not at all afraid. Maybe that’s what makes him do it, then, what makes him choose this. “Sofia,” he says, turning to see her jump when he says her name. “Sweetheart, I need you to start the overriding or whatever it is you do.”

She looks confused, and moves to a computer, and that’s when the tech in his arms starts shrieking - she’s cottoned on to what he’s about to do, while Steve is still figuring out what’s going on. He clamps the metal hand over the tech’s mouth, but she’s fighting him, kicking and thrashing.

Unfortunately for her, she’s a scientist and he’s a trained soldier, and she doesn’t stand a chance as he pushes her back into the chair and pulls the headpiece over her. It only takes a second to strap her in, but she’s begging, now, begging him to _please_ not do this, to please let her go.

“Hit the button Sofia, and then you and your buddies can walk away from this,” Bucky tells her, and it’s almost surprising that Sofia still hesitates.

Luckily, one of the other techs doesn’t, and hits something, and the screaming starts. Bucky grabs Steve’s wrist - the bigger man is still shaking it off, still rolling his shoulders as if he’s not sure about his body, but he follows, just like that.

~~~~~

He used to think, a long time ago, that his body was a prison. 

He used to imagine that his brain, his mind, his soul, every thought and action he wanted to ever perform, they were all housed, imprisoned by the slim cage of his ribs, but the looseness of his lungs, the weakness of his blood. 

But now he knows better.

It is a strange thing, to see, to know, to do everything, to be ruled by something outside his head and still do what it says. It’s a thing that he never imagined happening, not once-upon-a-time, in a world where he used to have the full control of his body. Even when he was held prisoner by it, unable to turn his will into the full extent of action, even when he was being ruled by the whims of illness and weakness, it was always _his_ , it was always his choice to raise his hand or not, to protect someone or attack someone or run or jump or walk or sit, silently, drawing something.

He remembers 1959, when the programming was loose and he almost made it, almost, to where Peggy was in Washington D.C., until he was in Maryland and there was a family and the programming went on the fritz. He remembers killing a family that didn’t do anything, and he remembers trying to - wanting to - finish himself off, as a mercy, but he couldn’t.

He remembers every single person he’s killed, everyone he’s hurt. A girl in Virginia. A woman in London. A man - _so many men_ \- in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Israel. He remembers all their faces in such clarity that he could paint them, one by one. He remembers them all.

(His friends, he remembers the feeling of twisting Morita’s neck as he looked at him, shocked and terrified. He remembers Dernier’s hands against his wrists. He remembers because he cannot allow himself the privilege of forgetting.)

When it is quiet - when he is finally allowed to sit, he tries to focus on them, to _keep them real_ , because it’s his hands who did the killing for all that it wasn’t his brain that wanted to do it, for all that his soul was removed from the equation. But every time it was Bucky, it was Bucky who kept coming to him, late and night and when no one else was watching, it was always Bucky, right up until that night where it was Bucky for real, fighting him while he held a little girl ( _he remembers her_ ).

And then it was terror.

He didn’t realize, up until that moment, he hadn’t been fighting it with everything he had. He had not realized that all the screaming he did, all the fighting with himself to just _move his hands_ , just _get free_ , was all only a percentage of what he was capable of. He didn’t know it until his body was aiming a knife at the soft, tender flesh of Bucky’s throat, and he roared back enough that the knife went just sideways, just into the arm, just to where it was barely going to damage him.

Everyday since then had been a fight. An attempt to _roll his shoulders_.

 _Tilt your head_.

 _Shake it off, Rogers, shake it off_.

The gravity of Bucky was undeniable, the most consistent compass, the most accurate measure of the man who he wanted to be. He had spent his entire life, right until he flung himself into the cold arms of the sea, pulling to Bucky’s irresistible magnetic north.

Right up until he died. And now, right up until this moment.

Bucky’s hand was on his wrist, and they were running, the freedom of running without a single command, and he could almost feel himself pressing back into his skin, back into where it was _Steve_ in control again. “Come on, bud,” Bucky huffs, and they’re going through tunnels and hallways and up staircases. “We just gotta get to Natasha, come on,” he says, his hand tightening on Steve’s wrist, like if he holds on tight enough, nothing can separate them again.

The hallways are winding and narrow and he’s not sure if Bucky really knows his way around. He remembers, back in Brooklyn, in that part of his mind that is his refuge when the darkness is overpowering and the blood on his hands smells like _home_ , how Bucky used to try and find back alleys and back ways, but always ended up a little lost. He was never like Steve, he never knew just how to turn to find himself back on their corner, if the way he went wasn’t exactly the way he came back. 

He tugs, then, right, right, not left, and Bucky turns to look at him. There is red rimming his eyes, he looks tired and scared and strung out, and Steve feels his heart tug. It’s been seventy years, and Bucky’s face still does this to him, still makes him feel like Bucky is holding his heart in his fist, curled up tight.

( _I should have told you, Buck, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you._ )

“Steve?” he says, and Steve is so grateful, so grateful he didn’t say _Cap_ , or _Captain America_ , because he know that’s a kill trigger and he can’t bear it, the thought of Bucky’s blood on his hands. “Are you in there?”

There’s a fight going on in his head, to try and get command of words. He can speak, but often his words are parroted, or confirmations, things that they can use him for, to scare people, to hurt people. He can’t use his own words. The last ones he spoke, he thinks, were forty years ago.

( _Please stop,_ is what he said, is what he called out for, for it to just _stop_.)

Bucky doesn’t hold on, though. He turns, right, and they’re running again, each step pushing Steve more into his body, as if the feeling of Bucky’s skin against his is a beacon, even though he knows it’s probably that Bucky interrupted something, that the programming wasn’t finished.

He likes the first thought, more.

That’s when the alarms go.

There’s a door, at the end of the hall, a bulletproof door, glass, and Bucky sees it, and runs faster. Steve races next to him, outpacing him, until they’re almost there and Steve is through, and the door slides closed, Bucky’s fingers almost snagging on it.

Bucky is on the other side.

The terror, then: the terror does it. The terror fills him, he can’t, he just got Bucky back, he can’t lose him again, so he slams his whole body into the door, and it shakes but doesn’t give. He can hear himself yell, he can hear himself yell, he can hear himself yell _Bucky’s name_ , and Bucky looks back, his eyes wide.

“Steve,” he says, as he slams into the glass too, but it holds.

Steve can feel his body, it’s _his_ body, it’s his, filled with terror, watching Bucky slam into that glass door at the same time he does, and it holds, it holds like it’s held together by whatever fate it was that decreed that they could never have anything past 1945, that their whole world had to shatter that year, and they had to live with the consequence of it.

“ _Bucky_ ,” he yells again, and Bucky presses both his hands - the flesh one and the inexplicable metal one-

( _I should have looked for you, I should have gone to find you, I should have found you_ )

-and he yells, “ _I love you,_ you _jerk_ , now go, get out of here!”

“Not. Without. _You_.” Steve manages, still ramming into the glass, but there are people coming and they have guns, and Bucky is pulling his own out of holsters, and Steve is yelling wordlessly because fighting against the programming is painful, his memories are painful, and this scene, it’s even more painful.

Bucky turns just enough so Steve can see his profile. “I love you. Go,” he says, but Steve rams again, and Bucky snaps, in Russian, “Go, find Natasha, the redhead you attacked, tell her that I stayed, tell her she’s prettiest when she’s angry!”

Steve is stricken, then. The triggers, the command, it takes over, it pushes him out of his body again, it _betrays_ him, Bucky betrays _him_. It would have been kinder if he had shot him in the head.

He manages, another second, and another instant, to press his hand against the glass and yell something, just as he sees Bucky move into action, slip into fighting the army of men, armed to the teeth, before the trigger forces him away.

~~~~~

There is beauty in sacrifice, is what Bucky once thought, but now he doesn’t know if he agrees. He fights, he turns and shoots and kills and runs out of bullets and breaks someone’s face open and twists and gets shot at and gets shot at and gets shot at, until he’s broken and lying on the ground, and someone’s sick face is looking down at him, barrel of his gun pointed.

 _I’m sorry_ , he thinks, at Steve, _but not for making you go. For not being strong enough to stay._

The sound of the bullet leaving the gun is sharp, right between the eyes, and then there’s nothing.


	6. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have really obviously never taken a single journalism class. I'm sorry if this sounds terrible.

**Captain America vs. The Winter Soldier: 70 years of legacy against 70 years of atrocities**

**By Georgia Tanner, for Rolling Stones Magazine**

Steve Rogers is a tall man, imposing, and intimidating, even when surrounded by armed military and sitting comfortably at a low couch. He watches everything with the air of someone clearly traumatized, assessing threat levels at the door, at the barred windows, at the people who come in and provide him with everyday services. 

He is, famously, the most controversial war criminal on the planet, at the same time that he is America’s hero. His jail - and make no mistake, it _is_ a jail - is comfortable and serene, decorated to look like a 1940s apartment, and one can almost forget the heavy bars and steel doors, the constant surveillance of armed guards, or the Starktech cameras, designed to watch him twenty-four hours a day, and reportedly unbreakable.

But Rogers assures me that’s all unnecessary. He doesn’t smile when he does it - in fact, he doesn’t smile at all through our conversation - and tells me, as I sit, that he’s never destroyed anything in the apartment. “My mother wouldn’t have wanted me to,” he says, snappish, more at the guards than at anyone else. 

Rogers famously was the hero America needed in 1945, and after his disappearance and presumed death, the media around him hyped to a fever pitch that included comics and cards, movies and radio show, until the mid 1960s when young Baby Boomers found a distaste for war that culminated in the Hippie movement. Since then, Captain America has made resurgences in various forms - a 1980s cartoon designed to sell toys, a comic, and of course, most recently with the Avengers book series, where a fictionalized account of their lives includes heroes like Captain America, as well as fictional characters such as the Wasp and Marvel Girl. But Rogers isn’t interested in much of it. “I have some of the old comics,” he says, seriously, “but mostly I keep them because it reminds me of 1944. Not much does.”

Rogers was also recently discovered alive during the storm of the Triskelion falling and the Helicarriers destroying key parts of Washington D.C. Hauled out of Hydra control by the Avengers Black Widow, he helped eliminate key components of Hydra military operations while the Black Widow uploaded SHIELD files onto the internet with a fervor that overshadowed Snowden’s Wikileaks. But shortly after the events of April 13th went down, Rogers turned himself in for trial. 

When questioned about it, he doesn’t reply, instead favoring a gaze that suggests I’ve asked a stupid question. In fact, I spent a great deal of our hour together feeling as if all I was able to do was ask stupid questions. Suffice to say that Steve Rogers has a face for scolding. When I ask him about if he’s nervous for his trial, though, he shakes his head. “I’ve been waiting for this trial since 1946,” he tells me, “and I think that the American people and the global community need it. I owe it to everyone who is related to the people that the Winter Soldier killed, and I owe it to the world to provide them with the answers that only I know the truth about.”

Special prosecutors, however, seem to be unsure if they agree. Matthew Murdock, normally a defense lawyer in New York, and Jennifer Walters, an expert on war crimes, are both examining this case to see what can be done. They have gone on record stating that this is a complicated situation due to Rogers conditioning and treatment at the hands of Hydra, even while many pundits loudly call for Rogers head. However, and perhaps most importantly, what is left of SHIELD - including several analysts and some agents - state that Rogers is the key to dismantling what is left of Hydra, and that if any punishment is to be served, it should be done with SHIELD in an arrangement not unlike Frank Abagnale’s arrangement with the FBI. “I’ll do it,” Rogers says, his jaw clenching and unclenching, “I’ll burn down every head of Hydra, if I have to. But I don’t know if it’s a good idea. What they did to me, I don’t think it can ever be undone.”

Neurosurgeons agree, stating that they just don’t know, so Rogers remains in lockdown for now, although he admits that he provides as much information as he can in the form of maps, technical manuals, and anything else he remembers. “It gives me something to do,” he says, although there is an easel and a sketchpad lying on the apartment table. “Something worthwhile,” he adds, although _worthwhile_ is an interesting statement from a man whose wartime sketchbook fetched over two million at auction in 1998, and whose modern sketches are sold at rates that astonish art dealers when he allows one to slip out of his control. 

The impression left, then, is of a man who will never forgive what has been done to him, even as he forgives himself for what he has done. “Don’t think that I mix up blame and responsibility,” he tells me, severely, when I ask him if he understands that many people do not blame him for his actions. “I was not to blame, I was brainwashed. But I was raised to take responsibility. Someone has to.” He finishes this statement by saying, “Bucky tried-” before he went silent, staring at the window. 

Bucky, of course, refers to James Buchanan Barnes, his best friend, second in command, and until recently, a covert agent of SHIELD. The fact that James Barnes had survived in a similar fashion to Rogers, which is to say frozen only to be discovered recently, seems to be one of the great cover-ups of our time. Posing as his own grandson, Barnes was responsible for not only working diligently as a sniper and an agent for SHIELD, but also for the retrieval of Rogers, at the expense of his own life.

Rogers is reluctant to talk about Barnes, at first, until Hawkeye, my official escort, points out that if he wanted to memorialize Barnes, this would be the place to do it. “He was my best friend since we were six,” Rogers starts, with an impassioned tone to his voice. “He was always fishing me out of trouble, our whole lives long. I was always the one in trouble,” he clarifies, “Bucky was like a star, in our neighborhood. He had all the girls trailing after him, and he could have been friends with anyone. When I used to ask him why he chose me - this was mostly when I was fifteen - he would roll his eyes, and shake his head, and say _what do you mean, why? It’s not my fault no one can see how great you are. That’s their problem_.” 

In fact, Rogers spends the next forty minutes talking about Barnes - recounting scrapes, telling war stories, giving me insight into a man who history books sometimes gloss over a little for the shine of Rogers. But listening to this, clearly, Rogers doesn’t agree with those books, or anyone who thought that Barnes wasn’t responsible for the man who Rogers became. “My mother gets a lot of credit for raising me, but it was Bucky who loved me best.”

I ask him to clarify. Rogers almost refuses, but finally he says it. “He loved me best, like he should have loved some girl. I wish he had said something before he found me four months ago. I wish I had told him that I felt the same back.” But then he sits, stony in silence for a moment. “You can publish that,” he tells me, “because I’m not afraid of what people will say. Bucky was the best man I ever knew. He saved me, and I couldn’t save him. If people can’t respect that about him, it’s their problem.”

Rogers spends the last ten minutes of our meeting apologizing; not in a begging way, but in a way that befits Captain America. “I’m sorry I couldn’t live up to what people saw me as,” he begins, “I’m sorry I killed so many people. I’m sorry I didn’t fight them more, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t save Bucky.” He has to pause, then, visibly upset, and Hawkeye moves between us, but Rogers waves him away. He continues to apologize, and before I leave, he hands me two pieces of paper. “I want you to publish these, too,” he tells me, “if you can.” One is a list of names, hundreds of names, of the people who he killed, and the other is a beautiful rendering of James Barnes, his famous smile with the crooked front teeth making him shine through the paper.

Rogers is both a hero and a villain in his own life story, perhaps. But to say he is only the sum of the things he has done condemns him in a way I’m not entirely comfortable with. Perhaps the only thing that will allow us to truly understand the mind of a man so distinctly out of time, with a life so complex as his, is the time to see how the future events turn out. But I’m sure that we are better for the acts of Steve Rogers when he acted under his own power, as much as he sees himself responsible as well for the acts of the Winter Soldier.

 **Editors feedback:** Georgia, this piece needs serious polishing, and the title is _not_ working for me, unless you’re really going to go into more depth about this. Give me more quotes, don’t hesitate to transcribe entire portions of this interview - unless you’re turning it into a book. Are you? If you are, see me, we can discuss. I’ll print the Barnes picture but I can’t print the list of names, not without D.C. breathing down my neck. Also, if you’re going to insinuate that Rogers came out, can you do it with a bit less ambiguity? God, you know how I hate ambiguous statements like that one. 11am meeting on Monday over this. Good work, otherwise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, guys, thanks so much for bearing with me, and thank you so much for all the feedback, the comments, the kudos, for everything. I am really pleased that this has gotten such positive feedback! 
> 
> So as usual: this is betaed only by me, so mistakes are all my fault. Please let me know if you liked it! Comments, kudos, and even criticism is always welcome.
> 
> Thanks so much again, for sticking with me!

**Author's Note:**

> Dear readers: I am sorry. I am trash. 
> 
> I'm also told some of you may be interested in what's going on inside my head via social media (god only knows why) and if you really are interested in my occasional mad ramblings and constant Cap reblogs, I'm available on tumblr at eggsac.


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